I turned to the girl. She was sitting straight up now, her hands
posed on the arms of the chair. I appealed to her.

"Surely, Miss Alice, you will not let them drive me out into the
street?"

Her magnificent black eyes, narrowed, long in shape, swept over me
with an indefinable expression, then in a harsh, contemptuous voice
she let fall in French a sort of explanation:

"C'est papa."

I made another low bow to the old woman.

She turned her back on me in order to drive away her black
henchwomen, then surveying my person in a peculiar manner with one
small eye nearly closed and her face all drawn up on that side as
if with a twinge of toothache, she stepped out on the verandah, sat
down in a rocking-chair some distance away, and took up her
knitting from a little table. Before she started at it she plunged
one of the needles into the mop of her grey hair and stirred it
vigorously.

Her elementary nightgown-sort of frock clung to her ancient,
stumpy, and floating form. She wore white cotton stockings and
flat brown velvet slippers. Her feet and ankles were obtrusively
visible on the foot-rest. She began to rock herself slightly,
while she knitted. I had resumed my seat and kept quiet, for I
mistrusted that old woman. What if she ordered me to depart? She
seemed capable of any outrage. She had snorted once or twice; she