CHAPTER XLIV.
MISS FEATHERINGTON’S SHATTERED DREAM.
Marietta Featherington couldn’t seem to concentrate her mind upon that thirteenth chapter of “Lily the Lovely Laundress.” The handsome rat-catcher had just beaten the aristocratic villain to a pulp and would have finished the job neatly and thoroughly had not Lily raised her lovely fair hand and cried with the imperiousness of an empress:
“Pause, Giovanni! Pause! He may have a mother!”
Ordinarily Miss Featherington would have raced through the pages hungrily, avidly. Not so on this fair November afternoon. Whether it was the mince pie and melted cheese she had partaken of a bare hour before, or whether it was the even-more-so-than-usual grumpy mood of her employer, Joshua Barnes, she could not tell. Perhaps it was neither. She refused to analyze it. Whatever the cause, she felt heavy and wistful and sad.
From time to time the emotional Miss Featherington allowed Whitney Barnes to flit through the corridors of her imagination. He had walked heavily 305 through her dreams the night before. His strange words of yesterday had strangely moved her. Desperately she had striven to solve the mystery. Were they words of love? If so, how would Old Grim Barnes accept the declaration from his son’s lips that he loved the humble though, yes, though beautiful stenographer lady of the Barnes Mustard Company, Limited?
Miss Featherington had half expected to walk into Joshua Barnes’s presence that morning and meet with a torrent of abuse. She had rehearsed a cold and haughty retort. But her employer had greeted her with a gruff, “Good-morning,” and an expression that was equivalent to a smile.
Alas! the prince had not spoken.
Marietta pounded out forty-two letters containing references to as many different kinds of assorted and selected mustard before she succeeded in dismissing the heir to the mustard millions from her romantic thoughts and creating a new hero in his stead. The new hero some way fell down and she picked up “Lily the Lovely Laundress.” But even the “Lovely Lily” failed to thrill and she laid the book aside.