The voice of the little girl here rose with penetrating suddenness:
“She don’t ever eat much. She’s too thin.”
Viola, suddenly the objective point of interest of the table, felt herself growing red and embarrassed. That she might hide her face from this alarming concentration of attention, she pretended to drop her napkin, and bent down to get it. The landlady, with a tact that her appearance belied, saw that the girl was uncomfortable, and diverted the conversation.
It swelled, and was tossed back and forth about the table with much laughter and jest of a personal nature. There were but six people in the house besides Mrs. Seymour, and these seemed intimately conversant with one another’s histories and individual foibles. The school-teacher was attacked about an admirer known as “Little Willie,” and after a moment of confusion she made a spirited return on the young man beside her, whom every one called Charley, but who had been presented to Viola as Mr. Ryan. Charley’s infatuation for a lady who had ridden a bicycle in a recent vaudeville performance seemed to be a subject of gossip, and the school-teacher added further poignancy to the tale by relating how this lady, having made an appointment to lunch with Charley, had failed to keep the tryst. The glee roused over Charley’s discomfiture was loud and deep. A heavily bearded man who sat at the foot of the table, and was ceremoniously addressed as Mr. Betts, lay back in his chair and roared.
“Oh, Charley!” he gasped, when he had recovered his composure, “she got you straight in the slats that time.”
His wife, at the other end of the table, said with a prim air: “What I’d like to know is where Miss Mercer hears all these stories.”
“Little birds tell them to her,” said the child, in her sudden, piercing voice. “I guess they’re trained birds.”
After dinner, when they had gone up-stairs, the colonel stopped with Viola at her door. The passage was dimly lit by a gas-jet at the farther end, which was turned economically low. From the parlor bursts of laughter ascended.
“Well, good night, honey,” said the colonel. “I’m sorry you’re so tired.” Then, somewhat uneasily, “Do you think you’ll like it here?”
“Oh, I think so,” said Viola.