“No, but I hear her moving around restlessly, and putting the window up and down—and Miss Bascom—her room’s cornerways on the ell, she says she sees her looking out the window late at night ’most every night.”
“Miss Bascom’s a meddling old maid, and I’d put her out of this house before I would the little girl.”
“Of course you would! You’re all set up because she makes so much of you—”
“Oh, come now, Esther, you can’t say that child makes much of me! I wish she would. I’ve taken a fancy to her.”
“Yes, because she’s pretty—in a gipsy, witch-like fashion. What men see in a pair of big black eyes, and a dark, sallow face, I don’t know!”
“Not sallow,” Old Salt said, reflectively; “olive, rather—but not sallow.”
“Oh you!” exclaimed Mrs. Adams, and with that cryptic remark the subject was dropped.
Gordon Lockwood, secretary of John Waring, had a room at the Adams house. But as he took no meals there save his breakfasts, and as he ate those early, he had not yet met Anita Austin.
But one Saturday morning, he chanced to be late, and the two sat at table together.
An astute reader of humanity, Lockwood at once became interested in the girl, and realized that to win her attention he must not be eager or insistent.