“Yes,” Anna said; adding naïvely, “but where shall I take you? It is so new. I have not had a call like this before.” She felt shy about inviting him up to her own sitting room.
“In there?” he queried, pointing to the door of Mrs. Wilson’s drear little closed parlour.
“Oh, no,” replied Anna, “Mrs. Wilson never lets us go in there. It is too fine for anything but funerals and—” she was about to say weddings, but broke off confused, and they both laughed, looking at each other like two children with their innocent eyes.
“I can sit here,” said Keith, pointing, as he spoke, to the steep, narrow stairs. There was a red and green striped carpet on them, and a strip of grey linen over for protection. The little entry was bare of furniture, save for the small uncovered table on which Anna had placed her lamp.
“Very well,” she said, “I will borrow a chair from Mrs. Wilson’s kitchen;” and she forthwith brought out a clean wooden chair painted a light yellow, and placed it at the side of the stairway for herself, there being no room at the foot.
“I was going to say,” remarked Keith, musingly, as Anna sat down, “that these stairs are rather wide, and if Mrs. Wilson is particular about lending her chairs, I could make room for you here,” and he looked at her soberly between the stair-rails. Anna shook her head, but suddenly there came over them both a sense of the ludicrousness of the little scene they would have presented, had any one been able to look in upon them, and they laughed again, as Anna had not laughed since she was a child, something of exhaustion aiding to break down her wonted restraint.
“It is so funny, oh, it is so funny!” she cried, “to see you looking out between those bars as if you were a lion in a cage. Just think of the people at the meeting! What if they were to see us two. Wouldn’t they think it was dreadful?”
“Would you mind putting your hand into the cage?” asked Keith. “I assure you it is perfectly safe. This is not the man-eating variety.”
“You are sure?” Anna asked, with a woman’s instinctive coquetry swiftly developed, but giving her hand.
“It is such a beautiful hand,” he said, laying it very gently on his own right hand, which he had placed on the stair beside him, and at this, the first word of flattery which any man had ever spoken to her face, Anna blushed and grew positively pretty, as he looked at her.