Presently the ride was at an end, and Blue was following his young hostess into the wide hall, and passing the maid with head held high. Then he was seated in a small, luxurious room where parti-colored shadows played over the floor. The flickering lights seemed to inspire Caruso to a song, for he broke the stillness with a few startling notes. The boy hushed him at once, whereupon he retreated to the farther end of his perch, mopish as a reproved child.
Light feet came running along the hall, and Daphne appeared.
“Will you come upstairs? Mother is not at home, but Eudora would like to hear the bird. Wasn’t he singing a minute ago?”
“Yes,” nodded Blue. “I shut him up as quick as I could,” he added apologetically.
“Why did you?” was the surprised query.
The boy only gave a soft laugh.
The room into which Blue was ushered the little dressmaker might well have called “heavenly”; but he did not bestow upon it a second glance. The “princess” sister held his eyes—and his heart.
She was all and more, far more than Tillie Shook had pictured her, and he found himself wondering how “any feller could go off to Europe” and leave so beautiful a girl languishing for his love.
“Will he sing best in the sunshine?” Daphne’s question brought Blue back to the errand in hand.
“I do’ know. He don’t sing so much now as he did.—Caruso!”