"Yes, yes, dear, but go on—go on," interrupted the eager-eyed mother, with a smile. "I want to know what happened here—not back in the sixth century!"
"Yes, yes, I know," breathed Betty; "but they were so interesting—those things were! Well, of course I put the bank-notes with their clippings on the table; then I began on another drawer. It got to be one o'clock very soon, and Mr. Denby came home to luncheon. I wish you could have seen his face when he entered the library and saw what I had done. His whole countenance lighted up. Why, he looked actually handsome!—and he's forty, if he's a day! And there wasn't a shred of tiredness in his voice.
"Then when he found the bank-notes and the Buddha and the toby jug with the unnumbered clippings belonging to them, he got almost as excited as I was. And when he saw how interested I was, he unlocked the other cabinets—and how we did talk, both at once! Anyhow, whenever I stopped to get my breath he was always talking; and I never could wait for him to finish, there was so much I wanted to ask.
"Poor old Benton! I don't know how many times he announced luncheon before it dawned over us that he was there at all; and he looked positively apoplectic when we did turn and see him. I don't dare to think how long we kept luncheon waiting. But everything had that flat, kept-hot-too-long taste, and Benton and Sarah served it with the air of injured saints. Mrs. Gowing showed meek disapproval, and didn't make even one remark to a course—but perhaps, after all, that was because she didn't have a chance. You see, Mr. Denby and I talked all the time ourselves."
"But I thought he—he never talked."
"He hasn't—before. But you see to-day he had such a lot to tell me about the things—how he came by them, and all that. And every single one of them has got a story. And he has such wonderful things! After luncheon he showed them to me—some of them: such marvelous bronzes and carved ivories and Babylonian tablets. He's got one with a real thumb-print on it—think of it, a thumb-print five thousand years old! And he's got a wonderful Buddha two thousand years old from a Chinese temple, and he knows the officer who got it—during the Boxer Rebellion, you know. And he's got another, not so old, of Himalayan Indian wood, exquisitely carved, and half covered with jewels.
"Why, mother, he's traveled all over the world, and everywhere he's found something wonderful or beautiful to bring home. I couldn't begin to tell you, if I talked all night. And he seemed so pleased because I was interested, and because I could appreciate to some extent, their value."
"I can—imagine it!" There was a little catch in Helen Denby's voice, but Betty did not notice it.
"Yes, and that makes me think," she went on blithely. "He said such a funny thing once. It was when I held in my hand the Babylonian tablet with the thumb-mark. I had just been saying how I wished the little tablet had the power to transport the holder of it back to a vision of the man who had made that thumb-print, when he looked at me so queerly, and muttered: 'Humph! they are more than potatoes to you, aren't they?' Potatoes, indeed! What do you suppose made him say that? Oh, and that is when he asked me, too, how I came to know so much about jades and ivories and Egyptian antiques."