“I believe not,” Anne said, smiling faintly. “How did you lose your breath, Hobart?”
“Hurrying,” he explained. “I’m working with the receiver that’s in charge of my father’s business, you know. As soon as I found he wasn’t coming this afternoon I left. I hurried because I was afraid you’d be out somewhere. We haven’t any car, you know;—they’re in the receiver’s hands, too.”
“I’m so sorry, Hobart.”
“Not at all,” he returned, cheerfully. “It’s a good thing. There are lots of families that ought to learn how to use a sidewalk again. It’s doing all of our family good. We’d got like too many other people; we’d got to believing the only place where we could walk was a golf course. Bankruptcy’s been a great thing for my father—I believe it’ll add ten years to his life.”
Anne laughed and Mrs. Cromwell was pleased, for although the laugh was languid, it was genuine. The mother’s glance passed from her daughter to the caller and lingered with some favour upon his shrewd and cheerful face. Perhaps it was just as well that he had come, if he could amuse Anne a little.
“I never heard of any one who took that view before,” the girl said. “It’s pretty plucky of you, I think.”
“Not at all,” he said. “We’re all of us having a great time. Never had to do anything we didn’t want to before, and it’s such a novelty it’s more fun than Christmas. If it hadn’t happened I doubt if I’d ever have found out that I like to work.”
“But you did work, Hobart.”
“Yes,” he said, dryly. “For my father. This is a pretty good receiver we’ve got, and he’s showed me the difference between working for my father and working for other people.” He paused and chuckled. “Best thing ever happened to me!”
Anne did not hear him. The automobile signal that had caught her attention a little while before was again audible from the street, and she had turned to look. The long, gray, foreign car came slowly by, moving flexibly through a momentary clustering of other machines, and it seemed to guide itself miraculously, for the driver had no apparent interest in where it went. His attention was all upon the occupant of the seat that had been vacant a few minutes before;—upon her he gazed with such aching solicitude that he could be known for a lover at a distance all round about him of fifty paces and more. And not only he, but his companion also seemed enclosed within the spell that comes upon lovers, shutting out the world from them; for, as he gazed upon her, so she likewise gazed receptively upon him. But, being a girl, she was in fact aware of certain manifestations in the world outside the spell, which he was not, and she knew that she was observed from a Georgian terrace.