“Yes, I’ll come. I’ll be here at two o’clock, and I’ll try so hard to please you, Miss Carruth.” For a moment a smile lighted up the girl’s face and quite transformed it.
She was a plain, colorless little thing, but something in her smile made her very attractive.
“I shall be here. Good-bye for a couple of hours.”
The girl hurried away.
“Well, if she isn’t one of the oddest little creatures I’ve ever come across. I am sure I don’t know what impelled me to engage her, for I dare say I could have found a dozen others much better qualified to attend to things here, but—somehow—well, I dare say, there’s a lot of mother in me, and when our sympathies are aroused we sometimes do queer things.”
Constance was not conscious of having spoken aloud, as she moved about the Arch arranging and giving a touch here and there, until a laughing voice asked:
“What is this I’m listening to? A budding elocutionist practicing her monologue?”
“Does sound a little like it, doesn’t it? but it’s nothing half so brilliant. In fact, you might suspect me of bordering on mental aberration instead if I told you, so I reckon I won’t. But I am starved even if you are not. Let us go see what Blairsdale and Devon have to offer to-day.”
A moment later Constance and Hadyn Stuyvesant were seated in the little screened-off corner back of Charles’ counter, his duties transferred to his satellite, as he laid before his young mistress, and the one whom in his faithful old heart he had long cherished a wish to call his “Young Massa,” the dainties especially prepared for them by Mammy.