Fortunately Tinker did not like being petted; his sentiments, indeed,
on the matter of being kissed by the effusive verged on the ungallant.
He liked to be a nice woman's familiar friend; his attitude toward her
could be almost avuncular; but if a woman would pet him, he endured it
with the exquisite patience with which his father forever taught him to
treat the sex. In weaker hands than those of his father, he would
doubtless have become a precocious and irritating monkey, always and
painfully in evidence. But Sir Tancred and his creditors saw to it
that his life in the world was broken by spells of healthy, boyish
life, and he remained modest enough and simple-hearted.
As to his nerves, though they were always high-strung, the effects of
his cruel treatment as a baby wore little by little and slowly away,
until there was left only a faint dread, or rather dislike, of being
alone in the dark, and a tendency to awake once in a month or so,
crying out from a bad dream.
CHAPTER FIVE
TINKER'S BIRTHDAY BLOODHOUND
Hildebrand Anne came out of the long glass doors of the morning room of
the Refuge, as Sir Tancred had happily named the cottage at
Farndon-Pryze, which he had bought soon after Jeddah won the Derby at a
hundred to one, and whither he retired when he was at loggerheads with
Fortune, or Hildebrand Anne began to look fagged by London life.
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