Free Master of Melincourt by Susan Barrie Page A

another’s pockets to be capable of detecting flaws in one another.
    Jervis Errol’s own blue eyes began to resemble cool blue steel.
    “Indeed?” he drawled. “Then I really should have warned you that it wasn’t safe to come and stay with us because, for the very reason that you mention, we always leap to the defence of one another when an outsider considers it his, or her, duty to attack. In fact, we don’t like being attacked, do we, kitten?” holding out his hand to his niece. “Not even when a lady’s skirt is ruined by a slice of cream cake!”
    Marsha sought to justify herself.
    “It’s the second time to-day that the child has made a dart at me—”
    “Only because she has such a high regard for you.” Once more his hand was extended to the child. “Come over here, Tina, and fetch your usual footstool and sit at my feet. I promise I won’t bite you if you grab at me with sticky paws.”
    “My hands are not sticky,” the child objected primly, as she nevertheless crossed the floor and curled up on the rug at his feet. Her eyes regarded him reproachfully. “They were washed and scrubbed with a nail brush before I came downstairs.”
    “Good. That is an indication that Miss Sands is having an effect on you.”
    “You said I wasn’t to call her Miss Sands, but Edwina.”
    “Well, Edwina is having an obviously beneficial effect on you.” He glanced sideways at the governess, who had seated herself unobtrusively not far away, with that faint, gleaming, half-smile of his. “If only she can persuade you to be a little less impetuous sometimes we shall receive fewer complaints from lovely ladies like Miss Fleming here.”
    “Don’t be silly, Jervis,” Miss Fleming exclaimed, also protestingly. “You know very well I don’t really mind the child showing her affection ... and if Miss Sands can be Edwina I certainly have a right, as an old and established friend, to be called Marsha.”
    But Jervis merely smiled as if something about the statement secretly amused him.
    “Perhaps,” he suggested, “there are friends and friends ... and other relationships develop when the particular type of friendship is established,” and he glanced once more, and rather thoughtfully, at Edwina.
    Marsha, plainly regretting the edginess of her temper, made several attempts after that to return to her old relationship with Tina, but by this time the child was cagey, and not even broad hints that Miss Fleming had something upstairs in one of her suitcases that might interest Tina very much indeed had the desired effect. Tina remained close to her uncle’s side and said that would be very nice... meaning she was prepared to accept a present, if it had been bought for her, but she had already received so many presents in the course of her short life that she was not wildly excited by the thought of receiving yet another one.
    Her uncle rumpled her hair—which annoyed her for the first time as Edwina had spent a lot of time on it, inducing it to wave attractively and look soft and dark and cared-for, instead of lank and definitely unmanageable.
    Jeremy Errol tried to insist upon Edwina accepting a cup of tea, but she said that she and Tina had already had tea upstairs. After that he tried to draw her into conversation about herself, but she was even more cautious than Tina had suddenly become, and revealed little or nothing that could provide him with the smallest clue as to her likes and dislikes, her background or any particular ambitions that she nourished. Smiling whimsically, as if unaccustomed to being rebuffed in this way, but in no wise disconcerted by the experience, he then offered to accompany them upstairs when Edwina said it was time for them to withdraw, to have a look at the old schoolroom where, he assured her, he himself had once sat at the feet of a much more formidable female whose job it was to teach him the three ‘R’s’ than Edwina plainly was—indeed, he made it quite clear that he