Читать книгу First the Blade. A Comedy of Growth онлайн

56 страница из 83

“If you please——” Then, with a sudden alluring solicitude, “It’s only me. I’m not a tramp. Oh, I hope I didn’t frighten you?”

“Well—it was a bit of a shock.” Justin looked amused. “I may get over it.”

“I’m so sorry. It’s fearful meeting tramps, isn’t it?” She had all the Kent child’s horror of its bogey in her voice. “That’s why I was frightened, too. I thought you were one, at first——”

Justin murmured his gratification.

She amended anxiously.

“Oh, only from far off. But even if you were, I had to ask the way. And when I saw the bicycle I knew you couldn’t be. It’s a lovely bicycle.” She regarded it with wistful admiration and, insensibly, Justin thawed, like any other male child between eight and eighty, to the feminine intelligence that appreciated his hobby.

“It’s not bad,” he admitted, stretching out a long arm to twitch modestly at the bicycle’s covering, much as a woman straightens the hat that a man’s glance has told her is becoming. “Humber, you know.”

She nodded eagerly.

“They’re the best, aren’t they? Mother’s is a Swift. She’s going to have a Humber, though, when she comes back. She’s going to teach me to ride, then. She promised. I began, you know, before she went away. I could jump off splendidly as long as there was grass to fall on, but I couldn’t jump on. But Aunt Adela won’t let me practise at all now. I wonder——” her face lit up, “Oh—do you suppose there are bicycles at the Crystal Palace?”