For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
“I guess you’ll get it about right,” he said, and no compliment had ever pleased Adelaide half so much.
“I think so,” she confidently answered, and then at the door she turned. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter,” she said, “this is Marty Burke, a very important person.”
Importance, especially Adelaide Farron’s idea of importance, was a category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs. Baxter’s shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, “It is that,” and began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low, but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.
“Are you fond of pictures, Burke?” she asked. He just looked at her over his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would come back.
Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message without bias.
“He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced. He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he’ll go to-day.”
“What was his manner?”
Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as she replied:
“Insolent in the extreme.”