“Am I to understand,” said Elizabeth, “that we’re once more facing a contribution from the mysterious source of your treasured canary bird?”
Her quick eyes saw a stiffening in Mahala with which she had been familiar from her childhood. It seemed to be a faint tensing of muscles, a bracing of the spine. It was with real relief that Elizabeth saw so offensive a personality as Henrick Schlotzensmelter approaching her daughter with a smile of invitation. She hated the whole Schlotzensmelter tribe with their sauerkraut and their sausage and their pumpernickel and their arrogant talk of might. Ordinarily, she would have done almost anything to keep the Schlotzensmelter fingers from even remotely touching the hand of Mahala. In the circumstances she made her way to Mahlon’s side, sat down, and looked into his eyes. There she read that he was baffled, perplexed, and thwarted even as she, and she decided that it was not the time to whisper to him, no matter how surreptitiously, concerning any matter that would cause him the least disturbance. Her very deep annoyance over the Moreland flower basket and the anonymous white sheaf faded into insignificance when compared with the expression on Mahlon’s face, the look in his eyes.
Behind a busily waving palm leaf she had picked up, she kept murmuring in her heart: “Hunted! Why Mahlon positively has a hunted look on his face. There’s no reason why he should take his disappointment over Junior’s flower basket and that nasty white sheaf as seriously as that.”
To the last number Mahala danced out the party. She was wide eyed and laughing, and her contagion spread to other members of the class, some of whom would never again have the opportunity of a public appearance with the high lights turned on, in the social life of Ashwater. She was dancing with every one who asked her to dance—young or old—and all of the others were following her example. Even Edith Williams had danced with her uncle and with Mr. Spellman and with all the boys of the graduating class. Mahala had been surprised when she saw her on Henrick’s arm, but she had been constrained to admit to herself that the evening had been filled with surprises. She had been surprised at Edith several times. Not more so than when Edith had whispered at her elbow: “Do you know where Junior Moreland is?”
She had replied: “I do not.”
The surprise lay in Edith’s comment: “I suppose he’s in some of the saloons making a beast of himself. I should think he’d be ashamed.”
Meditating on this, Mahala remembered that it was the first criticism of Junior she ever had heard Edith make. She wondered that Edith had remained and gone on dancing when she felt reasonably certain that she was not very greatly interested in what was taking place after Junior disappeared.
When, at last, the harp was carried away, the weary musicians left the orchestra pit, the lights were turned out, and the Spellman carriage stopped at the gate, Mahala ran into the house, straight into the waiting arms of Jemima, where a little wisp of paper was thrust deep into the front of her dress. She knew that her mother was immediately behind her, so she cried: “My flowers, Jemima, what did you do with my lovely flowers?”
Jemima answered: “I carried all of ’em to the cellar. I put what I could in water and I sprinkled the rest and put wet tissue paper over them. Your Ma said she wanted to have a picture made of them to-morrow with you in the midst.”
Mrs. Spellman untied her bonnet strings and swung that small article from her head by one of them.