The girl had become
eloquent; she had _seen_, and, as she was eloquent as women generally
are, she was able to make the keen old man see exactly what she wanted
him to see. Then she told how Ferrier stuck to the sinking smack and
saved his patient, and Robert Cassall muttered, "That sounds like a
man's doings;" and then with every modesty she spoke of Tom Betts's
mistake. There never was such a fluent, artful, mock-modest, dramatic
puss in the world!
"Hah! mistook you for an angel. Eh? Not much mistake when you like to be
good, but when you begin picking my pocket, there's not much of the
angel about that, I venture to say."
So spoke the old gentleman; but the anecdote delighted him so much that
for two or three days he snorted "Angel!" in various keys all over the
house, until the servants thought he must have turned Atheist or
Republican, or something generally contemptuous and sarcastic. The girl
had him in her toils, and the fascination was too much for him. She
could look grand as a Greek goddess, calm and inscrutably imposing as
the Venus of Milo; but she could also play _Perdita_, and dance with her
enslaved ones like a veritable little witch. Robert Cassall was
captured--there could not be much error about that. He asked, with a
sudden snap of teeth and lips which made his niece start: "And how much
do you want to coax out of me, Miss Molly. Give me an idea. Of course
I'm to be the uncle in the play, and 'Bless you, me chee-ill-dren,' and
the rest.
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