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“Ah?” and there was a note of suppressed eagerness in the interjection.

Nanny began to feel uncomfortable.

As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that of the masters.

At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.

Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.