“Oh, Anita! You’re so funny! What do you care if he is spoiled anyway if we have a good time out of it? I’m sure I don’t. And it’ll be nice to have another fellow around, so many of our boys have gone off to college or to work in the city. And those that are left don’t care a picayune for the church affairs. I have to fairly hire Bob and Ben to come to anything we have here, and this Murray man, they say, is crazy about church work. If it proves true, I think the society will grow by leaps and bounds.”
“Well, what kind of a growth is that? Just following after a new man! That’s not healthy growth. When he goes they’ll go with him if that’s what they come for. Who is that outside? Perhaps it’s the man with the ice-cream. It ought to be here by this time. Go out and look. It may be some of those tormenting boys that live across the street. And the cakes and rolls are all under that window. I declare, I should think church members would teach their children better than to steal! Go quick, Jane. I don’t want to leave this butter now till I get it all cut in squares. But for pity’s sake, forget that new man, or you’ll be bowing down to him just like everybody else!”
“Oh, Anita! You’re perfectly hopeless,” giggled Jane as she fled up the basement stairs to the outside door to reconnoitre.
A moment more and Anita heard her friend’s voice ring out clearly in an eagerly hospitable voice among the syringa bushes outside the chapel window:
“Isn’t this Mr. Murray? Mr. Allan Murray? Won’t you come right in, we’re all expecting you—?”
Anita, cutting butter into squares in the pantry window in the basement, turned away with a curl of her pretty lip and slammed down the window. If Jane wanted to make a fool of herself with this stranger, she, Anita, was not going to be a party to it. And she carried the cakes to be cut to the far table in the kitchen quite away from the dining-room and went to work with set lips and haughty chin. The new man should not think she was after him, anyway.
VIII
Outside the church Murray Van Rensselaer, somewhat fortified within by the stolen bun and the two frosted cakes, whose crumbs were yet upon his lips, started in astonishment.
Of the unexpectedly warm greeting he caught but one word, “Murray,” his own name, and as he took it in, thinking at first that he had been recognized, it came to him what it would mean. The whole careful fabric of his intricate escape was undone. Unless he disappeared at once into vacancy he would be brought speedily forth into the light and have to explain. Some dratted girl he had probably met at a dance somewhere and didn’t remember. But everybody knew him. That was the trouble with belonging to a family like his and being prominent in society and clubs and sports. His picture had been in the paper a thousand times—when he took the blue-ribbon at the horse-show, when he played golf with a visiting Prince at Palm Beach, on his favorite pony playing polo, smashing the ball across the net to a world champion tennis player; the notable times were too numerous to mention. She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen the city papers yet or hadn’t noticed. Probably didn’t think it was the same name—It wouldn’t take long for the news to travel, even four hundred miles. That was nothing. He must get out of here!
He made a wild dash in the other direction, but came sharply in contact with a stiff branch of syringa which jabbed him in the eye right smartly, and for an instant the pain was so great that he could do nothing but stand still.