“There!—I see your finish,” said Burnett. “That’s one of her favorite opening plays. It’s all up with you, Jack, and your aunt will have to to go down for another damage suit when you begin to perceive that you have had enough of our family. But you’ll have to get out now, Betty, and let him get dressed for dinner. You needn’t cry about it either for he’s even more attractive in his glad rags than he is in his railway dust—my word of honor on it.”
“I look nice myself when I’m dinner-dressed,” said the sister, “so I sympathize with him and I’ll go with pleasure. Good-bye.”
She sort of backed toward the door and Jack sprang to open it for her.
“You can kiss her hand, if you like,” Burnett said kindly. “They do in Germany, you know. I don’t mind and mamma needn’t know.”
“May I?” Jack asked her; and then he caught her eye over her brother’s bent head and added, so quickly that there was hardly any break at all between the words: “Some other time?”
“Some other time,” she said, with a world of meaning in the promise; and then she flashed one wonderful look straight into his eyes and was gone.
“Isn’t she great?” Burnett asked, unlocking his suit-case in the most provokingly every-day style, as if this day was an every-day sort of day and not the beginning and end of all things. “Oh, I tell you, I’m almost dotty over that sister myself.”
“Do you suppose that I could manage to have her for dinner?” Jack asked, feeling desperately how dull any other place at the table would be now.
“I don’t know. When I go down to my mother I’ll try to manage it; shall I?”
“I wish you would.”