"Doris," warned her mother, "you're talking too much."
"Oh, do let the dear little soul say anything she likes to me, Betty!" protested Miss Tripp. "If you knew how I enjoyed it!"
Doris nestled closer to the visitor, eyeing her mother with the naughtily demure expression of a kitten stealing cream. "I was going to tell you something funny," she said, "but I can't think what it was. I guess I'll remember when we're eating dinner."
"The artless prattle of a child is so refreshing, you know," continued Miss Tripp, "after all the empty conventionalities of society. I simply love to hear the little darlings—especially yours, dear Betty. You are bringing them up so beautifully!"
VIII
When Mr. George Hickey rang the bell at the door of the modest Brewster residence that night, it was with the pleasant anticipation of a simple, but well-cooked dinner, of the sort a bachelor, condemned by his solitary estate to prolonged residence in that semi-public caravansary known as the American boarding-house, seldom enjoys.
He was very far indeed from a knowledge of the fact that he was in the oft-quoted position of the man in a boat on the hither side of the great rapids of Niagara. Mr. Hickey had allowed himself to be drawn into feeling a somewhat uncommon interest in Miss Evelyn Tripp, it is true; but he attributed this feeling wholly to the fact that he had known Miss Tripp when he was a tall, awkward boy of twenty and she was a rosy, fascinating miss of sixteen. She had laughed at him slily in those days, and he had resented her mirth with all the secret and hence futile agony which marks the intercourse of the awkward youth with the self-possessed maid. But the scar which Evelyn's youthful laughter had left in his bosom had remained unwontedly tender—as an old wound sometimes will; and when after the lapse of years they had met once more Mr. Hickey found the lady so surprisingly sweet, so gentle, so altogether tactful and sympathetic, that he could hardly escape a pleasant and soothing sense of gratitude. They spoke of old times—very old times they were; the mere mention of which brought a delicate blush to Miss Tripp's cheek. And the auroral light of youth, which never appears so roseate as when it shines upon the cold peaks of middle life, irradiated their common past and appeared to linger fascinatingly over Miss Tripp's somewhat faded person.
It had not, however, occurred to Mr. Hickey that the foregoing had any bearing whatever upon his own immediate future, nor upon the immediate future of Miss Evelyn Tripp. In a word, Mr. Hickey was very far from contemplating matrimony when he entered the Brewster's cheerful little parlour, bearing a box of bonbons for its mistress, and a jumping-jack capable of singular and varied contortions, for the young Brewsters.