Mr. Cluett strolled in, and the four drew up chairs. There were three roast chickens, hot, carved up into handy "drumsticks" and slices by Mr. Masterman; "French fried" potatoes; a cut-glass dish of peach preserve; fruit cake; bakers' rolls; and an electric percolator filled with savory coffee.
"Some little lay-out," observed Mr. Cluett, who was hungry after his evening's "work-out". He stepped into the chair next Daisy's by tilting it and swinging his leg over the back to the seat.
"Yes: Bob done well, for once," said Miss Stella, "gener'ly, when he's ordering a supper, the only thing he can think of is 'poached on' and raisin pie."
"What have we got to drink, Stel'?" demanded Mr. Masterman, hitching his cuffs as he prepared to serve the chicken.
"Coffee," returned Miss Yockley, winking at Nick Cluett and Daisy; "we're gettin' ready for when the country goes dry."
"Well," said Mr. Masterman, who had paused aghast, but had recommenced to breathe freely as he had intercepted the speaker's wink; "I guess I can stand it as long as Stella can, anyway—and that ain't very long."
"You bet it ain't," admitted Miss Stella, going to the buffet and bringing back three bottles ofchampagne; "See what the milkman left us for the baby, this morning."
"Let it out, then, let it out!" said Bob Masterman, laying down his carving-fork and setting out glasses; "I'm as dry as the night before, boys."
Under Miss Yockley's deft offices, a cork popped promptly, and four glasses were filled in as many seconds.
"I guess we can let Nick off the water-wagon for to-night," said Mr. Masterman, "while we drink confusion to the Masked Man. But what's wrong with Prettiness here? Swore off?" This to Daisy, who had made no movement to lift her glass.
Daisy merely dimpled and shook her head.
"Somebody say something," interpolated Miss Stella; "Come on, Kid—if you knew the pain Bob's in, you wouldn't keep him waiting. Do you want some water in it—or what?"
"Water in it!" ejaculated Mr. Masterman, "Help!... 'Water in it?' she says, as though she meant it."
Nick Cluett, who, glass in hand, had been regarding Daisy narrowly, spoke out.
"Let up, people," he said, tersely; "she don't want it."
"Oh, dewberries!" observed Bob Masterman, mincingly. "Well, here's to the trimmin' our boyNick so nearly got—may we never, never be so near the cruel bread-line agen!"
Supper passed amid a continual "kidding back and forth" between Miss Yockley and Mr. Masterman, which speeded up as the champagne bottles emptied.
"Oo-aw!" said Miss Stella, fanning herself and rising at length, a little unsteadily, from behind her emptied glass and coffee-cup; "I feel like a breath of fresh air."
"You don'tlooklike a breath o' fresh air," chortled her drinking companion; "you look like t-ten cents' worth o' tough luck, Stel. Get on your hat, an' I'll walk you 'round the block, little one."
With this, the two passed into the front room. Daisy thought they were joking about going out, till she heard the hall-door slam behind them. Then she jumped up.
"Wh-why—have they gone?" she said.
"They sure have," said Mr. Cluett, leaning back lazily in his chair; "but we should worry."
"Will they be long?" said Daisy.
"Search me," responded Nick Cluett; "They may go to a picture-show. Maybe they'll slip into a vaudeville show. We don't care—eh?"
Daisy looked out into the empty front room of the suite. A gramophone on a small table met her eyes.
"Let's put on some music," she said.
Cluett got up, and came over, and stood beside her.
"Not to-night," he said, looking down. The champagne had brought a kind of dull color to his cheeks and forehead. "What do we want with music, kid? Come on—let's be a little friendly, huh?" His strong lean arm slid around her waist.
It was then that Daisy lifted up her face, let all the coquetry pass from it, and regarded him with eyes that were straight and sober.
"Stop it!" she said.
For answer, the arm tightened about her. Nick Cluett leaned to kiss her.
"If you don't stop it," said Daisy, rigid in his arms; "you're no gentleman."
Cluett relaxed his arm a little. His queer-smiling face, with its keen eyes, slanted down towards her in concentrated, silent interrogation. Daisy's spirit of mischief tempted her to drop her eyes; but she managed to resist the impulse and to keep her features sober-expressioned.
"You're not goin' to be friendly, then?" he said.
Daisy dimpled ever so slightly. "Not just now", she answered.
"Do you mean that—or don't you?"
"I mean it," said Daisy, simply; "not in here, anyway. Why can't we go out, and get a breath of fresh air, too, and go to a picture-show?"
Nick Cluett took his arm from her waist, reached for his hat, and opened the hall-door.
"Come on," he said, "I'll see you safe home, Kid."
"Who's the boy?" said Daisy, over her shoulder, to Jean; as, glancing out of the window of the big Harrison kitchen, she saw, at the front corner of the house, a younger man get out of the car after the bulky Sir Thomas. "I thought all the visitors here were elderly men. There's been no young ones at all since I've been here."
"Ey?" Jean came to "keek," resting a hand on the shoulder of the younger girl, "why, if it's no young Harrison! Did I never tell ye Sir Thomas had a lad? Well, well." Jean sat down again to her pea-shelling.
"Ay," she pursued, as her rapid fingers stripped the split pods of their green kernels, "yon's Harold Harrison. He looks like his father, an' he talks like his father, and as to his disposeetion—well, I'm bound in fairness-like to say he's a bittie of his good mither—just a wee wee streak, like the lean in bacon—pinched in between thick layers of Sir Thomas himsel'. The young-lad's no so rough-edged in manner—the college has polished him on the ootside.... But I'll say nomore: ye'll see him juist now, when ye serve the supper."
And when Daisy did see the young man—sitting with his knees crossed and his elbow on the edge of the table, talking to his father but not noticing the quiet, awkward mother at all—she almost dropped the tray she was carrying. For Harold Harrison and the masked fighter who had boxed four rounds with Champion Nick Cluett, were one and the same young man.
"I'd know that chin anywhere," said Daisy, as she confided to Jean the discovery she had made, "it's just like his father's. And his lower lip is burst, too, just where I saw Nick hit the masked fighter. He has a piece of red sticking-plaster on it."
"Mon, mon!" Jean was interested; "is that so, then? I kenned he was a boxer; and I suppose, as the Harrisons has the name of getting what they 'go after,' its no surprisin' he's won to the top. It's aye the way. He has everything—his money, his schooling, his place in society, his business chances—an' yet he'll no be satisfied till he steals the boxin' honors from a puir lad that has nothing but his gloves. Nick's a machinist; and, up till lately, when money from his matches commenced to come in a little, he's had to do all his training in the nicht-time; while the Harrison lad's had all day and all night, if he needed, tomake himsel' pairfect.... Ey, ey—it's the way o' the warld, lassie."
"He'll never beat Nick," some flash of vague enthusiasm warmed Daisy for an instant; then she added—boxing terms and predictions coming handily to her tongue after that chatty hour across the supper-table from the "sporty" Miss Yockley—"he'd never last twenty rounds, or even ten, in a finish bout. Nicky Cluett," Daisy concluded with feminine irrelevance, "is a gentleman. The other fellow would be afraid to fight him without a mask on."
Jean laughed. "He didna wear the mask to protect himsel' from fists, lassie. He wore it so naebody would ken him. That's why young Harrison's seconds was masked too. Ye see, the Harrisons' footing in society is no that sure that they dare play tricks with it—as they wad be doing, they think, if it got oot that Harold met a professional boxer in a public theatre. Ey, Sir Thomas has won everything now but a place in society, an' he's bound he'll have that, even if it means havin' the whole family operated on.... But ye'd better serve the dessert, bairnie: the rattle o' the knives an' forks on the plates out in the dining-room sounds empty, as if they was through their meat."
As Daisy stepped into the dining-room, young Harold, at a sign from his father, paused in hisaccount of the boxing-match till the girl had collected the used dishes and withdrawn, as he thought, out of earshot. But Daisy, on her mettle, halted just outside the swinging door, and caught every word with her keen young ears:
"——And so, Dad, I took it easy in the fourth round. The only reason I went into the bout was, that I wanted to try myself out against this fellow Cluett, who is supposed to be pretty good—and is, too, as witness my lip (first time I've ever been hit since the days when I was a learner!) I didn't want to beat him," young Harrison, as if seeking sympathy with this un-Harrison-like sentiment in the proper quarter, glanced at his mother, "right in front of his own crowd. Besides, he'd have lost his deposit, which means quite a bit to him, and nothing to me."
"You done wrong, son," Sir Thomas Harrison thrust out his chin, and whacked his hand on the table; "Y' done wrong. Beat 'em! Whack 'em! Round 'em up! Get their money. Show 'em who's boss. I'd never have b'en where I am to-day, if I'd ever passed up a chance to hand a man a wipe on the jaw, when I had him goin'."
The big Harrison villa,—with its broad ostentatious drive, its unsightly smear of cement bridge spoiling the green dip in the lawn, its elaborate superstructure which told of contractors' supplies bought at a dealers' reduction—soon became familiar to Daisy from its concrete cellar to its attic that resounded, mornings, with the virile thudding of young Harold's punching bag.
"Don't you ever put anything on a shelf, or hang anything up, or turn anything off?" she demanded, one morning, as, coming down from the top floor with her broom, she passed the door where the heir of the house of Harrison stood in his dressing-gown, combing back his thick black hair before a mirror.
"Whence the query, fair one?" said Harold, playfully.
"Well," said Daisy, stopping in the doorway with the roses of recent exertion coloring her cheeks superbly, her eyes dancing in their bright challenging way, and her plump arms displayed to fine and not unconscious advantage as she folded them over the broom-handle which leaned inthe bend of her elbow; "one of your boxing-gloves was under the shower-bath, with the water running on it; and your sweater was on the floor below the punching bag, tramped in the dust——"
"There shouldn't be any dust up there," said Harold, easily; "What do you suppose we pay our little housemaids for? Uh?"
"Is that so!" retorted Daisy; "well, you'd better give orders for the wind not to blow, then; and you'd better have your father pull up that nasty concrete drive, where all the dust comes from; and——"
"See here! See-e here!" Sir Thomas Harrison's son jerked out, spinning on his heel and facing her; "what do you mean by talking to me like that? Who do you think you're speaking to—the chauffeur or the stable-boy? Get on downstairs, or wherever you're going, and don't have so much to say." Then, as the young heir of the place turned again to the mirror, he added in audible soliloquy, "dashed cheek! These infernal domestics are getting to think they can do and say what they please. Some of these days that cook and I are going to have a rumpus too. She chooses coolly to forget, and to keep right on forgetting, the instructions I give her about my food.—What! you here yet?"
"Yes!" said Daisy, looking at him with hercheeks burning redly and her eyes fixed and bright; "I'm here yet—MisterHarold!"
"Oh, a-all right," observed the young man, sarcastically, throwing out his palm with an elaborate motion toward a chair; "won't you have a seat, Miss—er—er— Miss Housemaid?"
Daisy's long eyelashes described a flashing arc as she swept the crown prince of the dynasty of Harrison from head to house-slippered toe. Then she turned away. Harold Harrison, as he heard her shoe-heels tapping smartly down the back stairs, grinned at his reflection in the looking-glass.
"That's putting 'em where they belong," he said; "Some kid, though, be-lieve me—some kid!"
Jean, at the big cooking range, heard Daisy come into the kitchen and thrust the broom into its holder with a rap. Then there came silence, enduring for so long that the Scotswoman glanced questioningly around. Daisy had dropped into a chair, and was sitting in a kind of brown study, finger at lip and eyes looking ponderingly out of window.
"Now, now, lassie!" said the cook, kindly; "it's nae business o' mine, likely; but this is a big hoose, an' ye canna be through reddin' up the rooms yet, an' it's nearly eleven o'clock. Is onything amiss?"
Daisy related her encounter with young Harrison.
"Ey, ey," Jean smiled grimly as the girl told her what young Harold had said about the cooking; "so he's no farin' quite as he wad at the meal-table, and would like a bit brush with me, would he? Well, I canna be aye getting' up special dishes for his lordship, so I may as weel prepare to receive him. Did he tell ye of the wee bit tiff we had ance before, him an' me? No; he didn't. Well, I'll tell ye, in a few words. He talked wi' his tongue, and I talked with the besom; and the interview juist lasted four minutes by the kitchen clock. He's no a bad lad althegither, but he needs a canny bit breakin' in."
"Well, I'm not going to bother breaking him in," said Daisy, lifting her chin, "he's not worth it."
Jean laughed. "Well, onyway," she said, turning again to her own work, "don't let him start ye broodin', so the rooms'll no be done when our good leddy goes over the huse. Ye ken weel she'd turn to and mak' up the beds hersel', sooner than raise a fuss. Lassie, lassie, speakin' about the Mistress, I'm sore worried. She's failed terrible this last month. I keep tellin' her to drink milk, but she canna keep it doon. She eats nae mair than yon dickie-bird—a great big strappin' wumman like she is—or was—too! If onythinghappens to the leddy o' the hoose here—guid-bye Harrisons! It's only for her sake I'm bidin' here, at the wage I get. I've got a standin' offer o' half as much agen from Lady Frances Ware—Sir William Ware's mother."
At the mention of Ware's name, Daisy gave a little involuntary start. But she did not tell Jean that she too had an offer of a position in the household of Sir William Ware.
"I suppose ye've no heard," said Jean, turning a protruding skillet-handle out of her way as she reached up for the flour-shaker, "that the young lad here—Harold—is engaged to a girl o' what they call the smart set. He's a takin' lad in some ways; but he's got Sir Thomas's way o' looking at marriage. It's nae good, Harrisons thinks, unless it brings social advantage. Ey, the conquest o' society is uphill work for puir Sir Tom.... By the bye, Sir Thomas himsel' is one person that, if onything happened our leddy, would not miss her much nor mourn for her long. Ey, he blames her, like, for 'keepin' him back'—her, that made him!"
"Hae ye no mercy on yon phone, bairnie," observed Jean, rolling cut-cakes at a side-table, an afternoon or so later, "skirlin' itsel' sick in the corner there. If it's yon grocery-man, tell him from me he's gone daft, an' I'll be changin' oor custom if he's no more canny with thae orders, like."
Daisy came out of one of the moods of pensiveness into which she had been in the habit of falling, lately, since the junior master of the house had inaugurated his policy of "putting her where she belonged." Skipping over, she took the phone from the hook.
"Hello!" she said; "Waghorn's grocery?"
"Not this time, stranger," said a dry voice at the other end of the line; "but you've got two more guesses, if you like."
Two dimples sprang into view near the corners of Daisy's mouth, and a fine blush spread right to where the receiver rested against her ear. "I doubt it's no the grocery-man," murmured Jean, glancing over her shoulder as she laid a wafer of light, white dough in the bake-pan that stood, larded and ready, at her right.
"One guess'll do," said Daisy, into the phone; "it's you."
"Correct," certified the voice of Jimmy Knight, the jitney-driver.
Then followed a conversation of which, though the half of it could not of course be heard from Jean's post at the dough-board, the tenor was plainly discernible in Daisy's registry of dimplings, and tiltings of the head, and teasing pauses; and the final softly-yielded, "All right, I will,—bye-bye," as she hung up the phone.
When Jimmy Knight had called her "stranger" through the transmitter, this had merely been humorous irony; for Daisy Nixon and the young man who had first piloted her to the Harrison house, and later to the dancing pavilion at the park, had seen each other at least once, and very often twice, each week since.
On the evening after the telephone conversation just mentioned, Daisy, as she walked in her brisk, virile way to the trysting-place under the trees by the stone drive-gate, wishing that housemaids could afford suits instead of having to wear waists and skirts, knew that she was going to spend the evening at "a friend's house"; but she did not know that the friend was Jimmy's married sister, Mrs. Tom Farrell. Nor did she know that Jimmy had, in advance, instructed Mrs. Farrell something like this: "Now, Bet, this evening you'llhave the chance o' your life to help little Jimmy pull off something. Clean up the suite—yes, yes, of course I know you always do have it clean, honey; but I mean, clean it extra good, to-night—and spruce yourself up, and see that Tom gets his semi-annual haircut and has a clean sweater on; and fix little Tommy up real cute. You see, it's this way: I'm going to bring a girl around with me to-night—the best girl in——"
"M'h'm," Mrs. Betty Farrell had yawned, into the telephone, "go on—shoot. I got something else to do than stand with this phone to my ear, Jim, and listen to you rave."
"You sure have, Bet," Jimmy soothed; "I know that. Well, as I say, I'm bringing this girl around, and I want her to get the home idea. See?—the home idea! Then she'll be all ready for the proposition I intend to spring, on the way home——"
"Since when," interrupted the practical voice at the other end of the line, "have you started your bank account, Jimmy?"
"Sa-ay, that's a nasty one," Jimmy had protested; "what do you want to spring a thing like that on me for, Bet, when you know how I hate banks. I draw down twenty-five a week, as you know, and I'll slap on some accident insurance, and we'll rent furnished apartments——"
"Better wait till she says 'yes'," Mrs. Farrell had advised, as she prepared to 'hang up', "before you start counting your chickens. She may not care to take a chance on you. I know how I'd feel about it, if it was me. However, I'll do my best for you."
Jimmy, who was quite ready to admit any time that he was "no hand with girls," shoved his hat to one side, thrust his hands into his pockets, and spat aside as, waiting outside the Harrison gate, he saw Daisy approach along the gravel walk.
If he had come for her in the jitney, as usual, to take her for a companionable hour's ride up and down his round, as a "free" and welcome passenger, he would have felt at ease; for he had become used to that. But this waiting, with no friendly engine pounding away in front of him and no familiar steering-wheel to lean his hands upon, was enough out of the ordinary to have embarrassed Jimmy anyway, even without the mental consciousness of his deep-laid matrimonial plot, and the feeling he could not shake off that somehow Daisy might sense it prematurely and flee.
"'Lo, stranger," said Daisy, softly, taking the words out of Jimmy's mouth, as it were. She was a little shy, too; but Jimmy Knight was too busy with his own perturbation to notice that.
"H'lo yourself," he responded, with something like gruffness, "and see how you like it." As theydropped into step side by side, he added, with an inspired flash, "Lookin' kind of skookum to-night, us, Friend Nixon."
"I might if I had a suit on," Daisy said, in her forthright way, "but suits cost money."
"Never mind," Jimmy, in spite of the playful breeze abroad, strove to pull his new straw hat down more firmly on its elastic cushion of virile, curly hair, "you may have one, soon."
Daisy, who had not meant this at all, cast a quick side-glance at her companion.
"I wouldn't take a suit from you, if that's what you mean," she said, abruptly, flushing a little.
"There, now," Jimmy blushed an honest, vivid red, "I've went and made a break, first crack at the bat. Say, you do the talkin' from here on. I'll just listen. If I don't say nothin', I can't make nobody mad, can I?"
Jimmy Knight's married sister lived in a three-room suite, in an apartment block not far from the Commercial Hotel—that structure from whose windows Daisy had had her first view of the city's rooftops. As she followed her companion up the three flights of stairs, her mind reverted to that girl-wife she had seen from the hotel-window, hanging out a washing for three, and pinning the tinier garments in the centre of the clothesline.
"Come right in, people," invited Mrs. Tom Farrell, opening the door of Suite 30, as Jimmy,smiling humorously aside at Daisy, knocked like a bailiff; "You're as big an ike as ever, Jim. If you've waked young Tommy up, you'll go in and put him to sleep again. Mind that!"
Mrs. Tom was a pleasant-looking girl, a year or so older than Daisy, with a pretty mouth and a few freckle-dots on forehead and nose. Her hair was as red as Jimmy's was brown. She led the way along a short vestibule to the living-room.
"Tom's in the bathroom, having a shave," she said, with a kind of under-glance at Daisy; "I couldn't budge him out of his chair till I told him Jim was bringing a girl around, and then you couldn't see him for dust. All husbands is tarred with the same brush. Don't you ever get married, Miss——"
"Miss nothin'," said Jimmy, as they entered the neat room, with its "surface oak" centre-table, and buffet adorned with a cut-glass vase (a wedding present) filled with flowers contributed by the park gardener, who had a suite in the basement; "friend of the family, didn't I tell you, Bet. Name's Daisy, and she is one."
Jimmy was more at ease, in this familiar precinct. As his sister took Daisy's hat and went to put it in the bedroom, the two callers heard her remark, vigorously, to some object in an invisible corner, "Go off to sleep this minute, you! The idea!"
But the object only responded, wakefully, "Unk Dimmy! I wanna dinka wa'r."
"You want a spankin'," said his mother, reprehensively, "and you're going to get it. Don't bring him any water, Jim—he'll have the city waterworks dry, if he keeps on. It's the only excuse he can think of, for keepin' awake."
Jimmy, however, was at the faucet, with a glass of water half drawn. Carrying this, he dove into the bedroom as his sister came out.
"Might as well talk to the wind," said Mrs. Tom Farrell, "as them two. Well, of all——"
This last as Jimmy reappeared, carrying a sleepy three-year-old who, supporting the tumbler with two hands that had hollows where knuckles should be, was quaffing with all his might. Jimmy Knight had had an inspiration, which he was not yet sure was not a blunder, to show Daisy how a baby "became" him.
To Daisy, in spite of its neatness, the suite looked rather small and dingy. This impression formed itself quite unconsciously, not as the result of deliberate glances about. Probably it was a wholly involuntary comparison of these small rooms to the big garish apartments of the Harrison house, to which her eyes had grown accustomed during the past couple of months. At any rate, the impression came and stayed. Jimmy, however, had no means of knowing this; and, ashe glanced around at his sister's handiwork, he winked his appreciation at Mrs. Betty behind young Tommy's head; and shaped with his lips this soundless but energetic sentence, "You're a winner, hon'."
Tom Farrell, Senior, came from the bathroom presently, stroking a long, new-shaven chin. His eyes were narrowed sociably, and his mouth, as he approached Daisy, was kinked up at the corners in what seemed to Betty Farrell's critical regard, almost an ecstasy of friendliness. He paused, with the hand of greeting half-outstretched; then, tetering his shoulders a little, glanced first at his wife, and from her to Jimmy, interrogatively.
"Somebody introduce me," interpreted his wife, with considerable warmth and sarcasm, "or I'll go crazy."
"Daisy, meet Brother Tom," interposed Jimmy, diplomatically, as he saw a flash of temper in the glance Tom Farrell darted at his wife. A husband of four years' standing will not endure being put out of countenance before a pretty girl.
"Howdy," said Farrell, promptly; grabbing Daisy's hand and half for his wife's benefit and half because of Daisy's dimples, squeezing it hard and long; "howdy, howdy?... Say, Bet, what's that kid doing out of bed, this time o' night? Don'tyou know nothing at all? Get him back between them sheets, right away!"
"Put him to bed yourself, if you're so keen about it," Betty Farrell retorted, hotly; "it was Jimmy brought him out here, not me. Why don't you take a round out of Jim?"
"I said, put him to bed," Tom Farrell was losing his self-control as his temper rose, "and do it quick!"
"Come along, Boy," said Jimmy Knight, genially, speaking into the ear of Tommy, Junior; then winking at Daisy as he jerked his head in humorous apology toward the point where Tom and Betty Farrell glared at each other across the centre-table, "we'll go and pound our ear, son. We don't need a house to fall on us, to show us we ain't wanted, do we?" He got up, young Tom in his arms, and moved toward the bedroom.
"No, sir-ree!" Tom Farrell's long arm came out and scooped out of Jimmy's grasp the youngster, who started to cry; "it's got to be settled right here an' now who's boss of this establishment. I ain't goin' to let no woman run on me. Here, Bet—take this kid, and put him to bed like I told you!" The husband was now so far beside himself that he, for the moment, neither knew nor cared what impression he made. As he spoke, he held out the baby boy, who yelled and kicked vigorously.
But Betty Farrell backed away, letting young Tommy dangle from his father's outstretched arms.
"I don't have to take no orders from you," she said, putting her hands obstinately behind her back, "and I won't, not if you rave till you're blue in the face. I'll show everybody how much authority you have over me."
At this, young Tom felt himself set down hard on a chair. Tom Farrell, having thus freed his hands, hopped ragingly across the room and slapped his wife on the side of the face. Betty, true to the color of her hair, flared up, looked about for something to throw, and swept her hand with temper's wastefulness toward the cut-glass vase in the centre of the table.
"Hey!" Jimmy Knight reached across and rescued the vase; "you ain't mad five dollars' worth, surely, Bet." Then the brother got up and came around the table.
"Break away, break away," he said, casting a deprecating grin toward Daisy as he put one hand on his sister's shoulder and the other on Tom Farrell's chest, and pushed the two apart; "hittin' in the clinches is barred, boys. How about a little card-game, everybody? Bet and me will take on Daisy and you, Tom, and beat yous flat."
"Nothing doing," Farrell nasalled, closing his eyes and rocking his head from side to side in anobdurate negative; "this here thing's got to be settled first. Let a woman get the upper hand of you once, an' you'll never get her back in her place."
"Aw, go on, Bet," Jimmy gave his sister a little coaxing nudge, "put the kid to bed."
Betty Farrell raised eyelids, nose, chin and right foot, and brought them all down simultaneously.
"I—wun't!" she said; "so there."
This repetition of her refusal, though not this time addressed to him, brought Tom Farrell's wrath again to boiling-point, and he reached across and cuffed her twice more. Jimmy Knight's hand, which was still resting against his brother-in-law's chest, pushed Farrell firmly back.
"Don't do that no more, Tom," he said, his face and voice sobering a little.
"Why not?" flamed Farrell, turning on him.
"Well," said Jimmy, "I can't stand by and see you do it—that's all."
Farrell grew hoarse and purple. "Well, come on, then," he frogged, "I'll take on the whole blamed family, and lick 'em with one hand tied behind me." With this, his arm shot out; and Jimmy, taken unawares, received the blow full in the eye. Farrell followed quickly with a second thrust; but Jimmy was ready, and the fist glanced harmlessly.
"I don't want to fight you, Tom," he said, guarding himself with fair skill, as the brother-in-law, shoving the table aside with a jerk of his hip, pursued the attack furiously; "All I say is, be reasonable."
"Reasonable, nothin'!" croaked Farrell, as he landed again, cutting Jimmy's cheek with his thumb-nail; "I'll learn you to keep out, next time."
Jimmy did not answer. His lips tightened a little. Farrell, breaking through his guard again, struck the fast-blackening eye which had received his opening blow. Thereat Jimmy, with a vigorous shake of his shoulders, dived in manfully. There was a brief scuffle; then Jimmy's sinewy fist twinkled up hard, at short range, and Tom Farrell went down flat on the floor and lay there.
"Now, then!" the voice was Betty Farrell's; but it was addressed to Jimmy, not to her husband, this time; "see what you've done, with your dirty fists and your meddling. You've knocked him out—maybe hurt him—"
"He's all right," said Jimmy, a little sheepishly, "I—I never meant—there, he's stirring, now. I——"
"Well, get out, then," Betty Farrell dashed over and nervously opened the door leading out of the suite into the corridor; "go on—get out!I don't want no more fighting in here. Go on—you, too," this last to Daisy who, however, was already at the door.
Jimmy glanced at Daisy as humorously as a man might who had one supremely black eye and a cheek all over blood.
"I guess p'raps we might as well," he said.
There was silence on the way down the three flights of stairs, and comparative uncommunicativeness on Jimmy's part until the end of the walk home was reached and the two stood under the trees just within the Harrison drive-gate.
Then Jimmy, clearing his throat with the air of a man who has made up his mind to say something or die, observed, "I—I got to tell you one blamed good joke, Friend Nixon, before you go in."
"What?" said Daisy.
"Well," said Jimmy, "I—gr-r-h'm—I took you over there to-night to show you a happy little home in a three-room suite. As she turns out, however, that'n ain't so very happy to-night, huh? All my fault, for hikin' young Tom out of his crib."
"Oh, well," said Daisy, "everybody fights, sometimes."
"Yes, that's so," said Jimmy; "Yes, that's—that's so. But I—I—"
"'M?" said Daisy, feeling something in hercompanion's cadence that caused a soft little titillation of her nerves. She drew back further into the shadow as she felt her cheeks grow involuntarily warm.
"I know two of a kind—both of 'em easy-goin', I mean—that mightn't fight any more than oncet a week, at the outside. Do you think you could stand for that, Friend Nix—Friend Daisy?"
Daisy drew a long breath, raised her face, and looked clear-eyed at her companion.
"I know what you mean," she said, glad that the darkness prevented cheerful, curly-headed Jimmy Knight from seeing the shine of her glance and the color of her cheeks, "but I can't. Not the way I feel these days. What happened over in the suite to-night didn't make any difference. But—well, I just can't. I'm a funny girl."
"You sure are," agreed Jimmy Knight; "how long did you say you'd need to think it over?"
"Forever," said Daisy, firmly, in spite of the beating of her heart.
"All right," responded Jimmy Knight, bravely choking down a certain obstruction that had risen in his throat, "I'll give you a day longer than that, so's it won't look as if I was rushin' you. Well—so-long, kid," he held out his hand.
"Good-bye, Jimmy Knight," Daisy gave him her hand, then drew it away gently, and ran in-doors with tears in her eyes.
Sir William Ware put aside his book, covered a yawn, glanced up at the fireplace clock, which was about to chime nine; then, taking up the telephone which had been ringing with shrill iteration for a moment or two, casually laid his ear to it.
"Yes," he said.
"Sir William Ware?" vibrated the disk.
"Himself," responded Sir William, lightly.
"Well," said the voice at the other end of the line, "this is me."
"Eh?"
"Me."
"Ah." Sir William rubbed his chin in bewilderment; then he added, humorously, "MissMe? Right, so far?"
"You have a short memory," commented the voice on the phone.
"You have chanced," said Ware, pleasantly, "upon a melancholy fact, madam. But may I not ask the identity of—Jove! wait a bit, though! My creaking wheels of recollection are beginning to revolve.... I have it! I have it! Miss Nixon?"
"Yes," said Daisy's voice, in a matter-of-fact way, "it is. I want to see you."
Sir William, at the speaker's naive directness, covered the transmitter with his palm and rocked in enjoyment.
"Bravo!" he said, then, uncovering the instrument; "the city hasn't spoiled you yet, my dear—has it?"
"I'm waiting near that cafe we were at before," said Daisy, "how long will you be?"
Something in the bare blunt words made Sir William hug himself in an almost boyish ecstasy. "I shall come," he answered, "on the wings of Hermes. They should bring me into your presence in from three to five minutes, young lady."
Daisy Nixon, after hanging up the telephone in the little candy store across from the Cumberland Cafe, had waited barely four minutes in the shadowed street just beyond the circle of light from the Cumberland's windows, when she saw a tall figure, cane in hand, walk briskly into that area of illumination. She crossed the street.
Ware, dangling his cane and glancing about enquiringly, saw her when she was half-way across the circle of light and facing the full blaze of it. Her bright frank eyes; her clear girlish fresh cheeks, on which a certain nervousness kept the tide of color changing its shape and margin; her round maidenly lines of bust and hip andankle: all wrought curiously and strongly and with a united effect upon Ware, as they had on that night in the Harrison dining-room when his attention, drawn to her casually by the accident to the soup-tureen, had changed at once to the heartiest interest.
Material absolutely fresh and new! Molten and virgin gold, not yet resistable to the stamp of the die!
"Well," he said, stepping forward hospitably, "how are you, my dear? Shall we go in?"
"Yes." Daisy stepped inside, deliberately unpinned and hung up her hat, and sat down opposite to the baronet at the table he had chosen along the side of the room. It was the same table they had occupied on their previous visit.
"Don't order much," she said; "I'm not hungry. I came here to talk."
"I think," said Sir William, "that talking will be much more enjoyable. I dined late, myself. Suppose we have, say, a few grapes and a little something to drink—an iced drink of some sort."
"Anything you like," said Daisy. She laid her hands on the table, caught her lower lip under her teeth with a shy gesture that was delicious to Ware, and said—quite plainly, and without yielding to that impulse of coquetry which had made him so brief with her on their previous meeting—"Were you in earnest, that time you asked me to marry you?"
"My dear," answered Sir William, leaning forward, and extending his hand on the table until it was almost touching hers, "I made the proposal quite seriously and in good faith. I should not do otherwise. If you are still in a position to accept it, I make it again now."
Daisy looked across at the real eagerness in the fine eyes; at the face, with its skin cleanly and handsomely tinted under the few faint lines that indicated the light passage of the years; at the hand, smooth, white and gently masterful. Then she dropped her glance; but her voice was firm and her manner direct and frank as she answered him.
"I'll marry you," she said.
The white hand, with a strong and gentle pressure, came over hers, until her fingers were between the thumb and the heel of the palm. Something great and calm and authoritative seemed communicated with that touch. Daisy felt quelled and dutiful, but, best of all, as she lifted her eyes to his, she knew, less by his expression than by an unexplainable feeling within herself, that she could trust him. For in all essentials—so she read and knew calmly and surely that she read aright—he was, as Daisy herself would have put it, simply, "a gentleman."
"Thank you, my dear," he said, quietly, "I may say sincerely that I think we shall grow very fond of one another. Waiter!—here, please."
A dress suit glided forward and an obsequious ear leaned down. The waiter knew quite thoroughly what was "doing", although by the expression on his face during the conversation between Daisy and Ware, one would have thought he was working out in his head a problem in trigonometry.
"May I speak to the manager?" said Ware.
The manager, who had curly jet hair, an immense slope of white waistcoat, and an Alice-blue chin, appeared in exactly fifteen seconds.
"Have you," said Sir William, "a room where a marriage ceremony may be performed?"
The manager started a smile—but it got no further than a slight twitch in the eye-corners before something in Sir William's expression,—though the baronet changed not a feature nor abated anything of his pleasantness—checked it.
"Yes, sir," the manager answered, voice and face returning instantly to business formality; "my office is at your service, sir, if you wish."
"That will do nicely, thank you," said Ware, rising; then to Daisy he said, as he offered his arm, "we will go there now—shall we?"
Daisy nodded, without speaking. Her faith inhim was as absolute as it was instinctive and involuntary.
As the manager bowed them into the office—a room of fair size—and, partially closing the door, made polite exit, Ware handed Daisy to a seat, and himself dropped into the swivel-chair before the manager's desk and took up the telephone.
"Hello!" he said, as he got his number; "that you, Mrs. Heathcote? Good evening; how's your neuralgia?... Splendid, splendid—Iamglad to hear that. I say, is George about?"
Evidently George was at hand; for in a second or two the transmitter returned to Sir William's lips.
"That you, George? I say, are you busy?... Well, then, look here—could you slip around to the Cumberland Cafe, Osborne Street.... No, no, nothing about 'hay'; Cumberland Cafe, you ass.... Yes, that's it—can't miss it—big, bright, plate-glass windows, half-way between Wardlow and Pembina.... I say, that's very jolly of you, old man.... Yes, I—we—are waiting.... Yes: I said 'we'.... None of your bally business—that is, I'll explain when you get here. Make haste now, won't you?... Right-O!" Sir William hung up the phone and turned to Daisy.
"That was the Reverend George Heathcote, my dear," he said, "rector of St. George's. Do you know St. George's?"
Daisy knew it—a big Episcopal church, with beautiful chimes, that made Sunday morning glorious. Right in the heart of the fashionable district. Ivied to the gables, with a mighty stretch of green ground about, bounded by a massive iron fence. And its rector was familiar "George" and "old man" to him who was shortly to become her husband.
Daisy Nixon's heart bounded, and the color leapt into her cheeks. Three months ago, clad in an old smock of Jack Nixon's and with a cuff administered by Mother Lovina smarting and tingling on her ear, she had waded, on an evening that she remembered well,—because it was her last on a farm—down to a miry cattle-corral to sit in the rain and milk four cows. It was in this moment, as the recollection of that final ineffably drab farm evening slipped into her mind, that Daisy formulated a certain daughterly resolve with regard to her parents—a resolve she was afterwards able to keep.
"I should explain," said Ware, a touch of color in his cheeks and his fingers playing a soft tattoo on the desk blotter, "why I am doing things in this apparently hasty and stealthy manner. I have been expecting, for the last moment or so, that you would ask me to explain—and I may say that I consider it very sweet of you, my dear, that you have refrained from asking."
"Whateveryoudo," said Daisy, "is all right. I know that."
"Thank you, dear child. Nevertheless, I shall explain. In the first place, I have a very headstrong old mother at home, who considers me, in spite of my 58 years—yes, my dear, I am 58—not yet grown up. With her, there might—I do not positively say there would, but there might—be difficulties. In the second place, and to be quite frank with you and with myself, this is the main reason for doing things on the dot, as it were—I know that young people are to a certain extent impulsive and that a great many things may happen in a short time, and I want you just as you are now, before anything can happen to change you in any way. I confess freely, my dear, that I really want you very much, and that it has been harder than you may think, for me since I last talked with you to keep my resolve to let you quite alone so that you might think this matter out for yourself. That, having thought it out, you have not been afraid or ashamed to voluntarily let me know your decision, is to me convincing proof—though short-sighted people may think this paradoxical—of that modesty which is to me your most precious quality."
Nervousness, more than he had ever imagined his socially-inured self could feel, was the cause of the latter half of this little speech of SirWilliam's being slightly formal. This marrying of a girl "of the people"—forty years distant from him and yet in her land of boy-and-girl—which had been easy enough to do in theory, in his study-chair, was a "bit of a pull" in actual execution. He had just finished speaking, when there came a knock at the door.
"Ah!" he said, getting up, "I shouldn't wonder if that's our friend. That you, George?"
"Yes—and I've jolly well run my legs off," exclaimed a voice, as a bustling and rather stout figure in clerical coat burst cyclonically into the room, dropped into a chair, and fanned itself with a flat-crowned black hat. "I couldn't get it out of my head, some way, that you are more in need of medical than spiritual attention at the present moment, Will. Now, calm yourself, old man, and let me have the whole story, and we'll examine the matter squarely and sensibly. I assume," the Reverend George glanced at Daisy, whose color was rising, "this is the young lady in the case. Jove, Will, I thought you had more bally sense, especially at your time of life—I did, really."
Sir William looked at his ministerial friend open-mouthed; then, as the clergyman's meaning burst upon him, he sat up in his chair with a jerk.
"Now, look here, George," he said, as the swivel creaked at the vigor with which he gripped the chair-arms, "I should hate our forty-five years ofclose friendship to end in fisticuffs. It will, though, I give you fair warning, if—if—what the devil do you think I've been doing, you ass! Must I repeat that, of our mutual choice—quite unforced by circumstances, if I must say so baldly—Miss Daisy Nixon and I have decided to be married."
Reverend George Heathcote, who was smooth-faced and good-looking, except for a few myopic wrinkles around his eyes, put on his glasses and looked keenly at Daisy, who met his glance with nose and chin well up, and brown eyes flashing aggressively.
"Don't look at me like that," he said, after a moment, "please don't, Miss Nixon. I'm a blundering idiot, but I mean well—I do, really. Can you honestly, down in your heart of hearts, assert that you wish to marry the shelf-worn relic in the office-chair there? Can you?"
"Yes," said Daisy, pugnaciously.
"Oh—very well." Rev. George Heathcote, adjusting his glasses firmly, brought out from his pocket a black-covered book. Shuffling the leaves till he found the desired place, he closed the book, slipping his finger between the leaves; lowered it till it rested on his knee; and looked at Sir William, who looked back at him a little challengingly. After a moment of this scrutiny, the clergyman arose, went over beside his friend, and laid a hand on Ware's shoulder.
"Dear old man," he said, "I do want you to consider this thing very seriously. You've always been a bit of a boy, you know. I, of course, know the fancies you've petted about marriage—I always thought they were merely fancies, or I should have tried harder to reason you out of them. Now, is your mind absolutely, irrevocably, and after due deliberation made up? By the bye, have you thought of—your mother?"
Sir William Ware stood up, settling his coat about his fine spare shoulders.
"I have thought about everything—considered everything, George," he said. "I know you mean well, old chap," Ware, in turn, put his hand on his old schoolmate's shoulder, "but really, I don't care to discuss the matter any further, even with you. Besides, all this is, as you must understand, very embarrassing, for Miss Nixon." He turned to Daisy. "Come, dear," he said.
Daisy Nixon stood up; and, in the presence of two decorously expressionless figures of the cafe staff—the manager and one of the waiters—as witnesses, she was presently by brief and grave ritual united in the bond of holy matrimony to Sir William Ware, Baronet.
As the ceremony ended, and she stood awed and a little pale, Sir William approached and, very softly and tenderly, put his hands upon her shoulders and stooped to kiss her. He would havekissed her forehead; but Daisy, lifting her face with an altogether sweet gesture of yielding, gave him her lips.
His countenance, upon which the girl's eyes had continued to look as it approached near to hers for the caress, had not shown, in its nearness, any grossness of line or texture, any twitching muscle betraying some unexplainable dark trait. It was masculine, thoroughbred, honorable-eyed and—clean. It was pleasant and thoughtful. Face and figure were full of quiet mastery, yet had no outward suggestion nor pose nor plebeian ostentation of "masterfulness."
Daisy, in whose virile young body the habit of sound and healthy sleep was too firmly established for even an event so epochal as that of the previous evening to break her rest, awoke next morning, after a night of undisturbed slumber. A little clock, sounding one of the hours with chimes instead of the ordinary striking gong, drew her notice. The dial registered nine.
The first use she made of her opened eyes was to glance, with a thrill, about that beautiful pink bedchamber; a door at one end showing a little bathroom, tiled in clean and shining white, with folded towels on a glass roller above the long porcelain tub. The morning sun came rosily in through a curtained bow window, that had an alcoved seat piled comfortably with cushions. A fresh draught coming from another quarter drew her eyes toward an open way leading to a balcony, with straw matting, a hammock, and comfortable-looking rattan rocking-chair.
There was some uneasy feeling in the back, as it were, of Daisy's head. For a moment or two, she could not understand it; then, as she found herself instinctively glancing about the apartmentto see if there were any corners hard to reach with the broom, the solution of her sensation of unrest came. It was nine o'clock and she was still in mental habit a housemaid at the big Harrison villa. By this hour she should have had all the windows in the sleeping-rooms opened and the blankets and sheets turned back to air the beds.
Daisy laughed to herself, and snuggled back luxuriously on the deep soft pillows. Her mind resumed its office of recollection and ratchetted on over the events of the night before. The evening had been spent, by the rector's invitation, at his house, adjoining massive St. George's church. There had been a pleasant little wedding "dinner," during which Daisy had met a Mrs. Heathcote who had afterwards taken her off by herself and asked her a good many blunt and, as Daisy thought, rather intimate questions. She had met one Jessica Heathcote, too, a bird of slightly different plumage—a companionable, back-slapping girl, who sat on the edges of tables, or put her feet up on chairs like a man, while she conversed; haw-hawed and whacked her knee when she heard a good joke; and was in every way a person to banish misgiving and dolor and, unaided, to make things hum. Jess was coming over to see her early to-day.
"You'll need a bit of help, you know,young-un," Jessica had predicted, "when you face 'Grandmammah'. Yes—rathah!"
After the little family wedding-supper at the Heathcotes', Daisy had gone home with Sir William in the rector's car. Everybody at the Ware house had retired when they reached it, for the hour was well on toward midnight; and Sir William, after—as he jokingly put it, to Daisy—"smuggling" her up to this apartment, had pushed her playfully in, and with a squeeze of the hand and a whispered "pleasant dreams," had considerately departed to his own rooms.
The air that entered from the balcony was very inviting. Daisy could hear the whisper of ivy-leaves. Flower-breath came up and in from some hidden garden below. Fitful rattlings of a mower and the hiss from a hose-nozzle sounded on the lawn.
Daisy's garments—the white waist, the stuff skirt, the brown stockings, one with an incipient hole in the heel—lay over the foot of the bed, where she had yawningly cast them when she disrobed last midnight. They looked very cheap and poor and out of place in this lovely room; and Daisy pursed her lips a moment, and wrinkled her brows after a way she had, as she regarded them. But presently, with that little shrug of the shoulders that was her customary way of casting off trouble, she hopped out of bed, dressed up in theold clothes—which somehow, as she fastened them about her handily, conveyed a comfortable at-home feeling—and, sticking a pin or two in her hair, stepped out on the balcony. Leaning her elbows on the rail, she looked down and about.
The Ware house and grounds were very different from the Harrison house and grounds. No concrete in evidence here—no artificial terracing—no stone garage. No evidence of money anywhere, except such as was incidentally shown by possession, in the costly residential section of the city, of these great broad grounds, with their natural swell and slope; their big trees, between which here and there a little footpath wandered wild; their plain white street-fence, twinkling afar through the shrubbery. The house was frame, ivied from the ground almost to the chimney-tops (ends of the green runners, as Daisy could see on an adjoining gable, had climbed right up on the shingles), and with verandahs everywhere. It was a villa for people who loved fresh air; whereas the Harrison house, for all its massive and costly ostentation, was no more airy than a prison. The object in the case of the latter was display, the manifestation of the Ware place, good-mannered reserve, with reasonable provision for comfort and health.
The Harrison house was like a striped shirt, a broad-check suit, a scarlet tie, with a blatbumpfigure housed in them, thumbs in sleeve-holes, striding toe-out, gold chain-links dangling, diamond stud flashing, tongue blathering, along the main street. The Ware place was like one quietly-dressed and thoughtful, strolling in a grassy lane.
Down below Daisy was a tuft of shrubbery, and behind this the garden-hose was going merrily, with a sound like fat frying. A spray of water came out from a point near the base of the foliage; and, where it fell, the grass and the scattered coin-like yellow flowers glistened in the morning sun. These soft-petalled wild-flowers were the only manner in which gold or its effect was displayed on the Ware grounds.
Presently the nozzle of the hose came into view, and behind it the rubber tube emerged until Daisy could see a black-sleeved arm, with white cuffs turned back at the wrist. Then, following the arm, there passed into sight a statelily-moving, moderately stout, slightly stooped old lady, with a white lace cap pinned on her gray hair.
Lady Frances Ware, who, for more than three-score of her eighty-two years—ever since, in fact, she had become a member of the Ware household—had been an absolute ruler, possessed a face in which every lineament was almost mesmerically masterful. Beneath the silvered hair that on either side of its straight central parting, wasdrawn back smoothly under her cap, a forehead, puckered in a Frontenac-like way between the brows, sloped up and forward. Behind her glasses her eyes, keen, dark-blue, and eagle-like, looked out level-irised. Her mouth was bent down at the corner, and, beneath the underthrust lower lip, the chin was gathered tensely.
Evidently she had that uncanny faculty, peculiar to those long habituated to directing a household, of instantly and by instinct detecting the irregular; for she was barely in view, before her eyes travelled up to the balcony where Daisy leaned. Lady Frances adjusted her glasses; looked hard at the girl a moment; then turned off the nozzle of the garden-hose, folded her hands across one another at a point just below her waistband, and glanced off across the lawn toward where the mower was clattering.
"Will," she said, "come here—at once."
The mower stopped obediently; and Daisy, who had drawn back a little, saw the tall figure of Sir William come into view between the trees. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his neatly-cropped head was bare.
"Yes, mother," he said, as deferentially as though he were ten years old.
"Who," said Lady Frances, "is that—up there? Or do you know?"
Sir William, as he glanced up to the balconyand saw Daisy, gave a little start. Then he nodded and smiled at the girl; and, appearing to square his shoulders a little, turned again to the old lady.
"That, mother," he said, simply and with a dignity equal to Lady Frances' own, "is—my wife."
The dictatress of the Ware household lifted her eyes again, and regarded Daisy for nearly three minutes. Then she faced her son, took off her glasses, and looked athimfor a short period. As, at the conclusion of this survey, she inhaled preparatory to speaking, Sir William had an odd sensation of tingling down the backs of his legs, as in the days when his mother had prepared to supplement reproof with liberal administration of the tawze.
"Have you gone quite daft?" she demanded; then, with an imperious motion of her finger, she said, "Now, exactly what do you mean by this, Will? If you were not speaking seriously, I may tell you at once that I wish no trifling on such a subject. Now, answer me immediately."
"Well," responded Sir William, a little lamely, "we were married last night, mother—that's all. I don't know that there is much more I can say."
"I differ from you on that point," Lady Frances' voice was formal; "I think that there is a very great deal more to be said. I take it forgranted, however, that in a man of your years, this step was not necessary, or considered so, because of previous unwise conduct. Where did this affair take place?"
"In the Cumberland Cafe," Sir William said, redly as a lad.
"The Cumberland Cafe!" The old lady repeated the words slowly and with stress. "Will, I think you should be in a sanitarium—I do, really. Now, go up and bring that young woman downstairs at once. Meet me in the library with her. To say that I am astounded, and disappointed in you, would be to put it in the mildest possible way—the mildest possible way!"
When Sir William, his arm through Daisy's, entered the long drawing-room, Lady Frances had taken a seat near the window. The baronet led the girl over.
"This," he said, "is Daisy, mother. Dear—my mother."
"How do you do," said Lady Frances Ware, evenly. "Sit down." The words were plain, but without any inflection to make Daisy feel ill at ease. Lady Frances Ware, no matter what the provocation, never descended to the plebeian level of scolding or bullying.
As the girl took the high-backed chair by the window, a puff of the morning breeze bulged the great lace curtain, laying a fold of it across herknee. Bending forward to release the curtain, Daisy, in the necessary glance toward her coarse black skirt, became for the first time acutely conscious of her clothes. She had always moved in circles where people thought of clothes as entirely indexing the person. If she had had on a fine dress at that moment, Daisy could have faced a queen unabashed.
But Lady Frances never even glanced toward her new-made daughter-in-law's dress. She was concerned completely with the girl's face. Without any ostentatious flourish of lorgnette, but simply and quietly and thoroughly, she studied it.
"You have a frank expression, at any rate," she said, half to herself; then, more directly, she added, "How old are you?"
"Seventeen past," said Daisy, as though to a schoolmistress.
"Ah!" said Lady Frances. "Very young indeed to be away from home. But the viewpoint as to that is, I have noticed, different in this country. Where are your parents?"
"At—at home," said Daisy, a little confusedly. She wanted to avoid, for the present at least, explaining that she had run away from home.
"Quite so," commented the old lady, a little dryly; "and where is your home?"
"Out in the country—on a farm."
Lady Frances seemed relieved. "That is verysatisfactory," she said, "highly so. There are—possibilities—in young people who have been brought up out of contact with the city. And you are only—how old?"
"Seventeen, ma'am," Daisy repeated.
"You must not, of course, say 'ma'am'. But externals can be attended to gradually. Do you care for your—for my son?"
"I guess so," said Daisy.
Lady Frances, for an instant, looked at her so freezingly that Daisy moved her knees uncomfortably.
"That answer," said the old gentlewoman, "pleases me less than anything you have said, up to this point. I had hoped to find more enthusiasm—much more enthusiasm. In fact, it will be quite necessary to convince me that you are frankly enthusiastic in this matter before we shall get along at all."
"Daisy," put in Sir William, shrewdly, "is non-committal by nature, mother. You yourself know that you prefer that to evasiveness or untruthfulness. We shall be able to reassure you...."
"I shall most decidedly expect to be reassured," said Lady Frances Ware. She rose energetically to her feet.
"You may go now," she said, glancing in Daisy's direction. "Return to your room until I have Ada look you up something to put on.Will, I should like to see you again before you go downtown."
With these words, Lady Frances Ware returned to her duties among the flowers and hedges and shrubbery, in the fresh air that had brought her to past fourscore with full retention of middle-aged vigor in faculty and body. As she passed down the outer hall, she instructed the maid as to Daisy's attire.
"I think we shall go along very finely, dear," Sir William said as he went upstairs with an arm about Daisy's shoulder. "Now, as soon as Ada is through with you, I shall take you out for a spin—just our two selves. Can you drive a motor? No—then we'll have a lesson this very morning. It will be fine sport.... And, by the way, talking of 'going out' suggests going away. Where shall we go, for a bit of a wedding trip?"
"No place—not just now," Daisy looked up, then set her head on one side, put a finger under Sir William's lapel, and dropped her lashes, "I tell you what Iwouldlike to do, though, sir."
"Not 'sir'," put in Ware. "Say 'Will'. And don't flirt, even with your husband. In the first place, it's bad form; in the second place, I won't have it. Now, what's this you would like to do?"
"I would like," said Daisy, "to go over to Harrisons' for dinner, on Sunday, with you."