“Lill missee to see connle! Waitee waitee, bottom side housee,” interrupted the Chinaman, dividing his speech between Jack and the colonel.
“What! ANOTHER lady? This is no place for me!” said Jack, rising with finely simulated decorum.
“Ask her up,” chirped “Tinky” Clifford.
But at this moment the door opened against the Chinaman, and a small figure in a cloak and hat, dripping with raindrops, glided swiftly in. After a moment's half-frightened, half-admiring glance at the party, she darted forward with a little cry and threw her wet arms round the colonel. The rest of the company, arrested in their festivity, gasped with vague and smiling wonder; the colonel became purple and gasped. But only for a moment. The next instant he was on his legs, holding the child with one hand, while with the other he described a stately sweep of the table.
“My ward—Miss Pansy Stannard,” he said with husky brevity. But drawing the child aside, he whispered quickly, “What has happened? Why are you here?”
But Pansy, child-like, already diverted by the lights, the table piled with delicacies, the gayly dressed women, and the air of festivity, answered half abstractedly, and as much, perhaps, to the curious eyes about her as to the colonel's voice,—
“I runned away!”
“Hush!” whispered the colonel, aghast.
But Pansy, responding again to the company rather than her guardian's counsel, and as if appealing to them, went on half poutingly: “Yes! I runned away because they teased me! Because they didn't like you and said horrid things. Because they told awful, dreadful lies! Because they said I wasn't no orphan!—that my name wasn't Stannard, and that you'd made it all up. Because they said I was a liar—and YOU WAS MY FATHER!”
A sudden outbreak of laughter here shook the room, and even drowned the storm outside; again and again it rose, as the colonel staggered gaspingly to his feet. For an instant it seemed as if his struggles to restrain himself would end in an apoplectic fit. Perhaps it was for this reason that Jack Hamlin checked his own light laugh and became alert and grave. Yet the next moment Colonel Starbottle went as suddenly dead white, as leaning over the table he said huskily, but deliberately, “I must request the ladies present to withdraw.”