“I say, when’s your turn coming?”
“Never, I hope, doctor,” was the reply, as a little hand was placed in his, “never, if it is to make me so wretched as poor darling Di. Do say something kind to her if you have a chance.”
“Hum—ha—yes,” he said thoughtfully, as he retained the little hand and seemed to be examining a patient. “Don’t seem bright, eh?”
“Oh, no, doctor,” whispered Maude. “But I’m so glad you’ve come.”
“That’s right, my dear; I would come. So I will when you are married—the same as I did when you were born,” he said to himself. Then aloud—“I say, when you marry, my dear, you marry for love.”
“I will, doctor,” cried the girl with her blue eyes flashing, and just then Luigi of the organ struck up a languishing waltz. “But I really am so glad you’ve come. Do talk to papa and cheer him up. He is so low-spirited. Couldn’t you give him a tonic?”
“Wish I could,” said the doctor. “Tincture of youth. No, my dear. I can’t make the old young. Glad I’ve come, eh? There’s my little friend Tryphie yonder. But they are going to move, I see.”
Her ladyship was still very pensive, and gazed appealingly round from one to the other of her guests; but her eyes were wonderfully wide open, and she moved about like a domestic field-marshal determined to carry out her social campaign with éclat.
“Sir Grantley,” she said, softening her voice down to a contralto coo as she laid her fan on the arm of the elderly young man, whose face on one side was all eye-glass and wrinkles, on the other blank, “will you take down my daughter?”
“Charmed, I’m shaw,” was the hesitating reply, as a puzzled look came over the baronet’s face; “but her husband, don’t you know?”