Mrs. Leslie answered it quickly and somewhat indignantly. She had a sponge cake in the oven and the noise of the bell was enough to make it fall.
“What is it, sir?” but her tone of asperity quickly changed when she saw who was responsible for the clamor. “Well if it isn’t Major Sylvester Simpson. Sakes alive, Major Simpson, how did you find me out? I’ve been telling myself every day for two months that I ought to let you know I was in Wakely because of our families being kind of hereditary friends, but Mary and I are living in such a small way, and—”
Major Simpson—Major by courtesy only—made up in gallantry what he lacked in finesse. Not for worlds would he inform Mrs. Leslie that he was not looking her up at all and was quite as astonished to see her as she was to see him. He remembered her quite well as little Polly Bainbridge, whose grandfather’s farm was just across the creek from the Simpson’s farm. She had been a little girl when he was a grown man spending his yearly holidays in the country. He remembered faintly once having made her a present of a pink parasol on one of those visits. She was a very small girl and he was even then a floor walker at Burnett & Burnett’s. Perhaps that was how he happened to know the appeal a pink parasol has for a little girl.
Now that he had found her he must come in and see her. Of course it could not be that the person of whom he was really in search could possibly be living with Polly Bainbridge—now Mrs. Leslie—who came from his county and was of honest and respectable parentage as had also been her husband, people of good blood and reputation.
The Leslies’ living room was homelike, pleasant, and spotlessly clean, but with a certain feminine disorder in the way of a work basket open on the table, a scarf thrown over the back of a chair, a bit of embroidery on the sofa. This made an irresistible appeal to Major Simpson who, though a bachelor, was a great admirer of “the ladies” unless they happened to be “sales-ladies.” These he always regarded with suspicion as being either incipient shoplifters or, worse than that even, designing females who aspired to become Mrs. Simpson.
He settled himself in a comfortable overstuffed chair, conveniently low enough to allow him to cross his plump legs, and sniffed the pleasing odors emanating from the tiny kitchen.
“You must excuse me a minute,” blushed Mrs. Leslie, “but I have a cake in the oven.”
“Ah, that sounds like home!” declared the gallant Major. “And when I say home I mean the country. I fear me the city ladies trust to the bakers for such—” But Mrs. Leslie could not wait to find out what the city ladies trusted to the bakers as her cake had been in the prescribed number of minutes and the gas must be turned off and the cake turned out of the pan.
The major sniffed again. “Coffee!” was the verdict of his olefactory nerves. Like the Raggedy Man: “His old nose didn’t tell no lies,” for in a few minutes Mrs. Leslie returned with a tray of coffee and some hot doughnuts she had just finished frying when her bell pealed so loudly and persistently.
The guest ummed and ahhed with appreciation. He was self congratulatory that the little girl to whom he had once presented a pink parasol had grown into such a fine woman. He always had been a person of discernment and from the beginning he had known that little Polly Bainbridge was of the right sort. It was a pleasant thing to feel that a pink parasol cast on the waters might after some thirty odd years—or was it forty—be returned to one in the shape of fragrant coffee and hot doughnuts.