"No." Mr. Harrison was admiring Arethusa's lovely, eager face. "I haven't any idea who she is! Wish I did know! But mine's a hayseed, daughter of a friend of Aunt Nell's up from the country for the very first time in her life! That's what I drew for being in the family! Well, pray for me, fellows, for here goes!"
He made straight for Arethusa.
With each step he took towards her, the greater his admiration grew. Mr. Harrison's affections fluttered from girl to girl like a moth in a room, full of candles, unable to settle down steadily to one particular flame. He did not recognize Arethusa as his lady for the evening. He had been so late in going for her that she had been all muffled and waiting for him when he arrived. And he had not cared to look very closely at the figure in those wrappings. Mr. Harrison asked very little of the damsels he honored with his attention, save that they be pretty. He decided, without the slightest hesitancy, that Arethusa was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
She did not see him coming, or even hear his approach, with all her thought for the gay scene before her, until he asked her if she would mind telling Miss Worthington that Mr. Harrison was waiting for her.
Then she turned and smiled such a welcome of him from her shining eyes, that the weather-vane of Mr. Harrison's volatile affections veered to point straight Arethusa-ward.
"Oh, it's you! I'm so glad! I've been wishing you'd come! I thought maybe you'd forgotten!"
And the weather-vane became firmly fixed.
But Mr. Harrison felt as if some audible apology were surely due this dream of a girl for all those unkind things he had thought (and uttered), earlier in the evening, that her entertainment should have devolved upon himself. He considered himself now the very luckiest of mortals.
Arethusa laughed at his attempt at vindication of his first greeting of her, that ripply soft laugh of hers, and the susceptible Mr. Harrison named it the most musical, and the prettiest, laugh he had ever heard.
"You didn't know me, did you? I don't wonder, because I was so wrapped up when you came for me, and it was Mother's cloak! She thought I might take cold, because I'm not used to going out at night, and my own cloak wasn't near warm enough, she said; and so she...."