untrained, and it was
some time before he was permitted to leave the music-stool.

He rattled off a rollicking hunting song, full of gaiety and _verve_,
and followed it up with a little pathetic ballad, sung with an accent
of real feeling (he could throw more emotion into his singing than his
acting), while, although it was after dinner, the room was hushed
until the last notes had died away, and when he rose at length with a
laughing plea of exhaustion, he was instantly surrounded by a buzz of
genuine gratitude. Mark heard all this, and the last remnants of his
dislike and distrust vanished; it seemed impossible that this man,
with the sympathetic voice, and the personal charm which was felt by
most of those present, could be capable of finding pleasure in working
on a child's terrors. So that when Caffyn, disengaging himself at
length from the rest, made his way to where Mark was sitting, the
latter felt this almost as a distinction, and made room for him with
cordiality. Somebody was at the piano again, but as all around were
talking, the most confidential conversations could be carried on in
perfect security, and Caffyn, seating himself next to Mark, set
himself to remove all prejudices.

He put his case very well, without obsequiousness or temper, appealing
to Mark as a fellow man-of-the-world against a girl's rash judgment.
'You know,' he said, in the course of his arguments, 'I'm not really
an incarnate fiend in private life. Miss Langton is quite convinced I
am. I believe I saw her looking suspiciously at my boots the other
day; but then she's a trifle hard on me. My worst fault is that I
don't happen to understand children. I'd got into a way of saying
extravagant things; you know the way one does talk rubbish to
children; well, of joking in that sort of way with little
What's-her-name. She always seemed to understand it well enough, and I
should have thought she was old enough to see the simpler kind of
joke, at all events. One day I chanced to chaff her about a stamp she
took off some envelope. Well, I daresay I said something about
stealing and prisons, all in fun, of course, never dreaming she would
think any more about it. A fortnight afterwards, suddenly there's a
tremendous hullabaloo. You began it. Oh, I know it was natural enough,
but you did begin it. You see the child looking pale and seedy, and
say at once, "something on her mind." Well, I don't know, and she
might have been such a little idiot as