The young man with the laughing eyes said: “Anything wrong with the name?” and having shaken hands with “my daughter Hildegarde,” he departed.
“Did you say his name was Cheviot?” Hildegarde asked her father.
“Yes. The new recruit at the bank. Seems to be an intelligent sort of fellow.”
With ease and celerity Miss Bella transferred her affections from a faded photograph, a packet of letters, and a book of travels, to a real live young man with a square jaw that looked as if he meant business, but with a ready laugh, too, as if the business were not without its diverting aspect. Then he had rough brown hair that “fitted” him. Bella would have told you this was a rarity, most people’s beginning too far back from the forehead, or growing too much away from the ears, leaving them with a bare and naked look. Or it grew in a peak. Or it didn’t grow low enough on the neck and was like a badly made wig, that had slipped forward. Or worse than anything, it forgot where to stop and grew down into the collar like Professor Altberg’s, prompting the irreverent Bella to whisper to her neighbor (while the grave instructor was sitting with head bent over a Latin exercise): “How far do you think it goes? Do you suppose he’s hairy all down his back?”
However that might be, Cheviot’s hair fitted him. Moreover, he had, in Bella’s estimation, a fascinating, if somewhat mocking air toward little girls, and he helped one little girl gallantly through the dismal Sundays by the simple process of sitting in church where she could watch him. Once in a while in coming out, Bella would catch his eye, and he would laugh and give her a nod. On the rare occasions of his encountering Miss Bella at the Mars’, he never failed to stop and mimic her first greeting, “I’m ‘Ch-Cheviot,’ you know. Now what’s the matter with that name?” which was vastly entertaining, not to say “taking.”
John Galbraith came back to America that autumn, but he stayed in the East.
Bella didn’t much care what he did now, for she was thirteen, and in spite of the ugliness of their Hindu protégée Miss Wayne had joined the Busy Bees. That was because Hildegarde had told her that Louis Cheviot went to their dances. Bella saw at once the fitness of her doing the same. The result was that she seldom waltzed less than twice with the new hero, who, it must be admitted, was a better batsman than dancer. But nobody could help “getting through” with Bella as a partner, for she danced divinely. Cheviot should have been better pleased to get her for his partner, but it was plain that he was unduly preoccupied about “my daughter Hildegarde.” Several of the young men were. Bella told herself with a consciousness of native worth, that she had never minded in the least before. But this was different. She made up her mind that if “Ch-Cheviot” goaded her much further by this display of misplaced devotion, she would just take the misguided young man aside some day and talk to him “as a friend.”
She would tell him about Jack Galbraith.