The man in livery opened to me, and I was inside before he could observe that I was an intruder. True, I was in my best clothes--my Sunday clothes, as I should have called them at home--and they were none so bad; but they had been made in Boston, where fashions ranged on the sober side. Here I looked like a sparrow in a flight of bull-finches.
"Can I see Master Freake?" said I.
"No," said he, with uncompromising promptness.
"Is he at home?"
"No," he retorted.
"This is his house, I think?"
"It is," he assented.
"Then I suppose all these people are coming to see you--and cook," said I gravely.
The sarcasm might have got through his thick skin perhaps but for the intervention of another liveried gentleman, who briefly asserted that I was "off my head," and proposed a muster of forces to throw me out. My own feeling distinctly was that I was on my head, not off it; but his suggestion interested me, as I do not take readily to being thrown out of anything or anywhere. Luckily, a fresh arrival took their attention off me for a minute or two, and while I was standing aside to admire the lady, who should come statelily down the grand staircase into the hall but Dot Gibson. He too was in livery, but of a grave, genteel sort.
"Hello, Dot," said I, accosting him quietly.