"May we go, father?" asked Lorna, impetuously.
"Well, I thought," said the old gentleman, "I thought that you'd——"
"Father, I haven't been to a dance or a supper since you were injured. You know that," pouted Lorna.
"What do you want to do, Mary dear?" asked the old man, helplessly.
"It's very kind of Mr. Baxter, but you know we have a guest."
Mary quietly sat down, while Lorna's temper flared.
"Well, I'm going anyway. I'm tired of working and worrying. I want to have pleasure and music and entertainment like thousands of other girls in New York. I owe it to myself. I don't intend to sit around here and talk about tenement fires and silly old patents."
Burke was embarrassed, but not so the visiting fashion plates. Baxter and Craig merely smiled at each other with studied nonchalance; they seemed used to such scenes, thought Bobbie.
Lorna flounced angrily from the room, while her father wiped his forehead with a trembling hand.
"Why, Lorna," he expostulated weakly. But Lorna reappeared with a pretty evening wrap and her hat in her hand. She donned the hat, twisting it to a coquettish angle, and Baxter unctuously assisted her to place the wrap about her shoulders.