Elsie soon ventured to steal shy looks at Mr. Stanhope, and with her usual quickness discovered that he was more in terror of her than she of him, and she exulted in the fact.
"I'll punish him well, if I get a chance," she thought with a certain phase of the feminine sense of justice. But the sadness of his face quite disarmed her when her mother, in well-meant kindness, asked:
"Where is your home located, Mr. Stanhope?"
"In the seminary," he answered in rather a low tone.
"You don't mean to say that you have no better one than a forlorn cell in Dogma Hall?" exclaimed George, earnestly.
Mr. Stanhope crimsoned, and then grew pale, but tried to say lightly,
"An orphan of my size and years is not a very moving object of
sympathy; but one might well find it difficult not to break the Tenth
Commandment while seeing how you are surrounded."
Elsie was vexed at her disposition to relent toward him; she so hardened her face, however, that James rallied her:
"Why, Puss, what is the matter? Yours is the most unpromising
Thanksgiving phiz I have seen today. 'Count your marcies.'"
Elsie blushed so violently, and Mr. Stanhope looked so distressed that James finished his supper in puzzled silence, thinking, however, "What has come over the little witch? For a wonder, she seems to have met a man that she is afraid of: but the joke is, he seems even more afraid of her."
In the social parlor some of the stiffness wore off; but Elsie and Mr. Stanhope kept on opposite sides of the room and had very little to say to each other. Motherly Mrs. Alford drew the young man out sufficiently, however, to become deeply interested in him.