Millicent’s pretty eyes, apparently none the worse for their salt bath, looked reflective. “He may have been a nobody, but any one who Miss Frink believes saved her life becomes somebody right away.” The girl paused. “I see now why she seemed pleased to have me say it was fit for Prince Charming. Oh, that hateful old dressing-gown! If only Mrs. Lumbard didn’t say anything to Miss Frink about it after I came away! Grandpa, I can’t bear to do that the first thing.”
The girl buried her eyes against the arm she was holding. “Miss Frink doesn’t know that I didn’t know she had a young man in her house, and I calling him Prince Charming. Mrs. Lumbard has never seen him. Miss Frink doesn’t know that I have a grandfather who never tells me anything when I tell him every thing.”
Colonel Duane smiled and patted her. “Just go on telling me everything, and don’t tell it to anybody else. You laugh at me when you catch me talking to myself; but I’m like that man who had the same habit, and said he did it because he liked to talk to a sensible man, and liked to hear a sensible man talk.”
Then, as Millicent did not lift her head, he went on. “I’ll give you another quotation: a comforting one. It was our own Mr. Emerson who said: ‘Don’t talk. What you are thunders so loud above what you say, that I can’t hear you.’ Now, Miss Frink is, I suppose, as shrewd a woman as ever lived; and something that you are has thundered so loud above all that dressing-gown business that you needn’t lose any sleep to-night or quake in your little shoes to-morrow when you go back to her.”
Millicent breathed a long sigh and straightened up.
“Then I think I’ll go in and make a salad for supper,” she replied. “It’s such fun to have time—and it—it seems so ungrateful—”
“Tut-tut,” warned her grandfather; and just then Damaris came in at the gate.
“I heard you began reading to her to-day,” she said eagerly and without preface. “You look sort of pale. Did she scare you to death?”
“No. She went right to sleep. How could you hear about it, Damaris? I was coming to tell you.”