“Then why, Aunt Helene, didn’t you go with us to hear Farrar to-night? You aren’t usually so squeamish about——”
“Of course not. It was indigestion, if you must know. Certainly it had nothing to do with my optic nerves. You shouldn’t accuse me of jumping at conclusions, Jane, with all your irritating, positive ideas about other people’s——”
“It is my opinion—” the unofficial investigator thought advisable at this point to remind them that an outsider was present—“that your remembrance of the combination figures and the various turns was absolutely correct—ab-so-lutely. But you may have jolted the delicate mechanism of the lock when you shut the door. You may have slammed it.”
He received two glances for his pains to maintain peace, a quick, resentful one from the niece and a long, grateful one from her aunt.
“A beauty, isn’t it?” he continued buoyantly, looking at Jane, but referring to the snuffbox in his hands, lowered for closer inspection into the light of the electric lamp. “I don’t wonder that the thought of losing it distressed you, my dear Miss Lauderdale.”
“Associations, my dear Mr. Pape.”
Her brevity, cut even shorter by her accent, evidently was calculated to inform him that, although she had played, she didn’t care much for his game. For a young person who could warm one up so one minute, she certainly could make one feel like an ice-crusher the next! Since that’s what he was up against, however, he proceeded with all his surplus enthusiasm to crush ice.
“The sight of this heirloom takes one right back to the days of old, doesn’t it, when ladies fair and gallants bold——”
“You wax poetic from hearsay, Mr. Pape? You don’t look exactly old or wise enough to have lived in those good old days.”
“Miss Lauderdale, no. I don’t claim to have staked any ‘Fountain of Youth.’ In fact, I ain’t much older or wiser than I look and act. But I’ve read a bit in my day—and night. The courtly Colonial gent, if I remember aright, first placed the left hand on the heart—so.” Then he bent gracefully, not to say carefully, so that the seams of his satin straight-jackets should not give—thus. With his right hand he next snapped open his jeweled box and passed it around the circle of snufflers of the sex, who would likely have swooned at the thought of a cigarette as at the sight of a mouse—in this wise.