The duke quietly left his seat and went to look through the window with frank and unembarrassed interest in the approach. He went, in fact, to look at Little Ann, and as he watched her walk up the avenue, her father lumbering beside her, he evidently found her aspect sufficiently arresting.
“Ah!” he exclaimed softly, and paused. “What a lot of very nice red hair,” he said next. And then, “No wonder! No wonder!”
“That, I should say,” he remarked as Miss Alicia drew near, “is what I once heard a bad young man call `a deserving case.'”
He was conscious that she might have been privately a little shocked by such aged flippancy, but she was at the moment perturbed by something else.
“The fact is that I have never spoken to Hutchinson,” she fluttered. “These changes are very confusing. I suppose I ought to say Mr. Hutchinson, now that he is such a successful person, and Temple—”
“Without a shadow of a doubt!” The duke seemed struck by the happiness of the idea. “They will make him a peer presently. He may address me as 'Stone' at any moment. One must learn to adjust one's self with agility. `The old order changeth.' Ah! she is smiling at him and I see the dimples.”
Miss Alicia made a clean breast of it.
“I went to her—I could not help it!” she confessed. “I was in such distress and dare not speak to anybody. Temple had told me that she was so wonderful. He said she always understood and knew what to do.”
“Did she in this case?” he asked, smiling.
Miss Alicia's manner was that of one who could express the extent of her admiration only in disconnected phrases.