“Yes, that’s so,” said Lavinia, reluctantly. “But you can’t expect us to get everything all at onct. Why, Whatcom’s boom only started in six months ago.”
Mr. C. Daun Diller looked amused. “Oh, if it were this town only,” he said, sitting down on one of the hair-cloth chairs and feeling himself slide gently forward, “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. But the truth is, there are only three decent hotels in the whole Puget Sound country. But I know”—here he smiled at her again—“that it’s not safe to breathe a word against Puget Sound to a Puget-Sounder.”
“No, it ain’t,” said the girl, responding to the smile and the respectfully bantering tone. Then she moved to the door. “Well, I’ll see what maw says to it,” she said, and vanished.
Mr. C. Daun Diller stood up and pushed his hands down into his pockets, whistling softly. He walked over to the organ and looked at the music. There were three large books: “The Home Circle,” “The Golden Chord,” and “The Family Treasure;” a “simplified” copy of “The Maiden’s Prayer,” and a book of “Gospel Songs.”
The young man smiled.
“All the same,” he said, as if in answer to a disparaging remark made by some one else, “she’s about the handsomest girl I ever saw. I’m getting right down anxious to see myself what ‘maw’ will ‘say to it.’”
After a long while Mrs. Vaiden appeared in a crisply-starched gingham dress and a company manner—both of which had been freshly put on for the occasion. Mr. Diller found her rather painfully polite, and he began to wonder, after paying his first week’s board, whether he could endure two or three months of her; but he was quite, quite sure that he could endure a full year of the daughter.
A couple of evenings later he was sitting by the window in his quaint but exquisitely neat room, writing, when a light rap came upon his door. Upon opening it he found Lavinia standing, bashfully, a few steps away. There was a picturesque, broad-brimmed hat set coquettishly on her splendid hair.
“Maw wanted I sh’u’d ask you if you’d like to see an Indian canoe-race,” she said.
“Would I?” he ejaculated, getting into a great excitement at once. “Well, I should say so! Awfully good of your mother to think—but where is it—when is it? How can I see it?”