“Yes,” said Punch. “I know Mr. Gale.” Why did Morelli want to know?
“A nice boy,” said Morelli. “I don’t often take to the people who come here for the summer, they don’t interest me as a rule. But this boy——”
He broke off and watched Toby. He began to whistle very softly, as though to himself. The dog pricked up his ears, moved as though he would go to him, and then looked up in his master’s face.
“There’s another man,” continued Morelli, “that goes about with young Gale. An older man, Maradick his name is, I think. No relation, it seems, merely a friend.”
Punch said nothing. It was no business of his. Morelli could find out what he wanted for himself. He got up. “Well,” he said, wrapping his greatcoat about him, “I must be going back.”
Morelli came close to him and laid a hand on his arm. “Mr. Garrick,” he said, “you dislike me. Why?”
Punch turned round and faced him. “I do, sir,” he said, “that’s truth. I was comin’ down the high road from Perrota one evenin’ whistling to myself, the dog was at my heels. It was sunset and a broad red light over the sea. I came upon you suddenly sitting by the road, but you didn’t see me in the dust. You were laughing and in your hands was a rabbit that you were strangling; it was dusk, but I ’eard the beast cry and I ’eard you laugh. I saw your eyes.”
Morelli smiled. “There are worse things than killing a rabbit, Mr. Garrick,” he said.
“It’s the way you kill that counts,” said Punch, and he went up the beach.
Miss Minns was the very last person in the world fitted to give anyone a settled education; in her early days she had given young ladies lessons in French and music, but now the passing of years had reduced the one to three or four conversational terms and the other to some elementary tunes about which there was a mechanical precision that was anything but musical. Her lessons in deportment had, at one time, been considered quite the thing, but now they had grown a little out of date, and, like her music, lost freshness through much repetition.
Her ideas of life were confined to the three or four families with whom she had passed her days, and Janet had never discovered anything of interest in any of her predecessors; Alice Crate (her father was Canon Crate of Winchester Cathedral), Mary Devonshire (her father was a merchant in Liverpool), and Eleanor Simpson (her father was a stockbroker and lived in London). Besides, all these things had happened a long while ago; Miss Minns had been with Janet for the last twelve years, and fact had become reminiscence and reminiscence tradition within that time. Miss Minns of the moment with which we have to do was not a very lively person for a very young creature to be attached to; she was always on the quiver, from the peak of her little black bonnet to the tip of her tiny black shoes. When she did talk, her conversation suffered from much repetition and was thickly strewn with familiar proverbs, such as “All’s well that ends well” and “Make hay while the sun shines.” She served no purpose at all as far as Janet was concerned, save as an occasional audience of a very negative kind.