Yet, despite the assurances of the platonic coolness of his sentiments, his desire for her society grew with what it fed on. When by some engagement, impossible to be evaded, they could not take their accustomed walk together, he was filled with an unreasonable disappointment, and was almost angry with her till she should appear again.
On the last occasion the Colonel had interrupted them only a few minutes after they had met. Jerry, cheated of the hour he had intended spending on the park bench with her, left them in a rage. And so imperative was his wish to see her that the next evening, indifferent to the fact that he would probably find the Colonel there, he made up his mind to go to the house on Folsom Street and pay one of his rare calls.
Rion Gracey and Barney Sullivan were dining with the Allens that night. There was much to talk about and the party sat long over the end of dinner, the smoke of the men’s cigars lying in light layers across the glittering expanse of the table. There were champagne glasses beside each plate, the bubbles rising in the slender stems to cluster along the rim. These had appeared midway in the dinner, when, with much stumbling and after repeated promptings and urgings from Rion, Barney Sullivan had announced his engagement to Summit Bruce.
With glasses held aloft the party pledged Mitty and her lover. The encomiums of his fiancée which followed made Barney even redder than the champagne did.
“Oh, there’s nothin’ the matter with Mitt,” he said with a lover’s modesty, “I ain’t gone it blind choosin’ her.”
“Mitty Bruce!” the Colonel exclaimed. “Mitty Bruce is the finest girl in the California foot-hills!”
“I guess Barney thinks just about that way,” Rion answered, forbearing to stare at the blushing face of his superintendent.
“Oh, Mitt’s all there!” Barney repeated, allowing himself a slight access of enthusiasm. “She’s just about on top of the heap.”
Greatly to his relief the conversation soon left his immediate affairs and branched out to the other members of the little Foleys group. Black Dan was still at the Buckeye Belle. His daughter was at school in New York where she had been sent in the autumn at her own request. The girls asked anxiously after her. The few glimpses they had had of the spoiled beauty had inflamed their imaginations. It seemed part of the elegant unusualness which appertained to her that she should be sent to New York to finish her education, with beyond that a polishing year or two of European travel.
“How wonderful she’ll be when she comes back,” Rosamund had said with an unenvious sigh. “Perfectly beautiful and knowing everything like the heroine of a novel.”