Millicent’s grave large gaze was upon him, trying to discover whether he was serious. She liked Mr. Ogden, but she would have been perfectly willing he should snatch up Mrs. Lumbard.
“You’re quite a matchmaker, Colonel,” he went on. “I don’t know how that rosebud over there behind the tin pan escapes your machinations.”
Millicent threw a glance over her shoulder in evident search for the rosebud, and Ogden laughed.
“Oh, she,” returned the old man regarding the girl with eyes of placid love; “she has a heart like a flint. We have a lot of the nicest boys you’d ever care to know, in Farrandale. She used to like them, Milly did. When she was in the store, I used to have to complain of the way she let them bother around and keep her up late; but now she has left the store, and could sleep in the morning if she wanted to, she won’t have a thing to do with them. They can’t do anything right. One laughs too loud, one brings his mandolin and she hates it, one parts his hair in the middle, and they all varnish their locks—”
“Grandpa!” Millicent interrupted him with rather unnecessary severity, Ogden thought. “I don’t like to be discussed.”
Her grandfather laughed toward her affectionately, and raised his eyebrows. “Gracious!” he exclaimed. “What a grown-up baby I have.”
“Well, I must get at my business,” said the visitor. “I came this morning, not only to say good-bye, but to let you nice people be the first to know something concerning our friend Hugh.”
Millicent’s collection of knives hit the tin pan and clattered to the floor. The pan so nearly fell after it that Ogden, springing forward, caught it just in time. The girl’s hands trembled as she grasped it, and murmured some inarticulate thanks.
“Ah, many a true word spoken in jest,” said the Colonel. “That is why the lovely pianist is leaving Miss Frink’s; but conventionality can be carried too far, I think.”
John Ogden was busy restoring Millicent’s goods, wares, and chattels to her lap, and he camouflaged her tremor by laughing allusion to Uncle Remus, and Brer Rabbit’s clatter with his seben tin plates, and seben tin cups.