It was she who found words first.
“This is too bad of you, Mr. Hammond! You had no business to come here. You know I don’t allow it.”
But there was something in the voice that undid the reproach of the words. Hammond’s courage came back to him again.
“I have no defence to make,” he answered, in the same light vein. “The temptation was too strong for me, and I yielded to it. I plead the First Offenders’ Act.”
Belle turned gayly to her mother, who had concealed, by a strong effort, all traces of her recent agitation.
“What punishment shall we give him? I think, sir, you shall be sentenced to stay to tea.”
She opened the paper bags, and produced a store of those fearful and wonderful delicacies variously named crumpets, or pikelets, and said to have been invented by a member of the medical profession.
“You see you are in luck. To-day is Bobby’s birthday, and we are going to have a cake and all sorts of luxuries.”
Hammond began to feel like a man in a dream. He had walked straight out of tragedy into comedy. He had come to Hammersmith in search of an answer to the most terrible question which can present itself to a man who loves a woman, and he found himself in the midst of a children’s tea-party. Perhaps this was the answer, the best of answers, to the doubt which had striven to effect a lodgment in his mind. Sitting there, in the midst of Belle Yorke’s little brothers and sisters, as they trooped into the feast, watching her feed the hungry swarm, he found his dark thoughts dying away of themselves. Such an atmosphere was fatal to them; they could not live in it.
So the millionaire forgot his millions and his marchionesses and his ambitions, and threw himself into the spirit of the festival with such cordiality that he won the children’s hearts. Mr. Yorke, forgetting his former animosity, cut him the biggest slice of the birthday-cake with his own hands, and edified him with a full, true, and particular account of his exploits on the football field in that famous match between the Hammersmith Juniors and the Brook Green Stars, which is now matter of history. Master Reginald Yorke insisted on sitting on the stranger’s knee, and sharing with him the contents of a paper of brown sweetmeats, highly flavored with peppermint, which he called bull’s eyes. Belle’s grateful looks repaid him for his submission to these outrages, and when he rose reluctantly to go away he felt there was a new tie between them, stronger than there had been before.