If the anxious Aunt Helen had counted on any important results from this evening’s opportunities, she had not taken into her calculations the adroitness of Gail. In precisely five minutes Van Ploon was on the doorstep, with his Inverness on his shoulders and his silk hat in his hand, without even having approached the elaborate introduction to certain important remarks he had definitely decided to make. Gail might not have been able to rid herself of him so easily, for he was a person of considerable momentum, but he had rather planned to make a more deliberate ceremony of the matter, impulsive opportunities not being in his line of thought.
A tall young man in an Inverness walked rapidly past the door while Van Ploon was saying the correctly clever things in the way of adieu; and shortly after she had closed the door on Van Ploon, a pebble struck the side window of the library. Gail opened the window and looked out. Dick Rodley stood just below, with his impossibly handsome face upturned to the light, his black eyes shining with glee, his Inverness tossed romantically back over one shoulder, and an imaginary guitar in his hands. Up into the library floated the familiar opening strains of Tosti’s Serenade, and the Reverend Smith Boyd glanced out through the study door at the enticing figure of Gail, and knitted his brows in a frown.
“You absurd thing,” laughed Gail to the serenader. “No, you daren’t come in,” and she vigorously closed the window. Laughing to herself, she bustled into her wraps.
“Here, where are you going?” called her Uncle Jim.
“Hush!” she admonished him, peering, for a glowing moment, in the study door, a vision of such disturbing loveliness that the Reverend Smith Boyd, for the balance of the evening, saw, staring up at him from the Vedder Court tenement sketches, nothing but eyes and lips and waving brown hair, and delicately ovalled cheeks, their colour heightened by the rolling white fur collar. “None of you must say a word about this,” she gaily went on. “It’s an escapade!” and she was gone.
Uncle Jim, laughing, but nevertheless intent upon his responsibilities, grabbed her as she opened the front door, but on the step he saw Dick Rodley, and, in the machine drawing up at the curb, Arly and Gerald and Lucile and Ted, so he kissed Gail good-night, and passed her over to the jovial Dick, and returned to the study to brag about her.
Gaiety reigned supreme once more! Lights and music and dancing, the hum of chatter and laughter, the bustle and confusion of the place, the hilarity which brings a new glow to the cheek and sparkle to the eye, and then home again in the crisp wintry air, and Dick following into the house with carefree assurance.
“Gracious, Dicky, you can’t come in!” protested Gail, with half frowning, half laughing remonstrance. “It’s a fearful hour for calls.”
“I’m a friend of the family,” insisted Dick, calmly closing the door behind them and hanging his hat on the rack. He took Gail’s cloak and threw off his Inverness. “I guess you’ve forgotten the programme.”
“Oh, yes, the proposal,” remembered Gail. “Well, have it over with.”