"I think you will be quite warranted in being very good to Mr. King—while his hours drag as he describes," Ellen assented cordially.
"As soon as I can sit up at any sort of decent angle I can do a lot of work on paper," King asserted. "Then I'll make the time fly. Meanwhile—it's all right."
They talked together for a little, then King sent for Franz, who came and played superbly, his eager eyes oftenest on Jordan King, like those of an adoring and highly intelligent dog. Anne watched Franz, and King watched Anne. Mrs. Burns, seeming to watch nobody, noted with affectionate and somewhat concerned interest the apparent trend of the whole situation. She could not help thinking, rather dubiously, of Mrs. Alexander King, Jordan's mother.
And, as things happen, it was just as Franz laid down his bow, after a brilliant rendering of a great concerto, that Mrs. Alexander King came in. She entered noiselessly, a slender, tall, black-veiled figure, as scrupulously attired in her conventional deep mourning as if it were not hot June weather, when some lightening of her sombre garb would have seemed not only rational but kind to those who must observe her.
"Oh, mother!" King exclaimed. "In all this heat? I didn't expect you. I'm afraid you ought not to have come."
She bent over him. "The heat has nothing to do with my feelings toward my son. I couldn't neglect you, dear."
She greeted Ellen cordially, who presented Miss Linton. King lost nothing of his mother's polite scrutiny of the girl, who bore it without the slightest sign of recognizing it beyond the lowering of her lashes after the first long look of the tall lady had continued a trifle beyond the usual limit. Book agent though she might be, Miss Linton's manner was faultless, a fact King noted with curious pride in his new friend—whom, though he himself was meeting her for but the second time, he somehow wanted to stand any social test which might be put upon her. And he well knew that his lady mother could apply such tests if anybody could.
In his heart he was saying that it seemed hard luck, he must say good-bye to Anne Linton in that mother's presence. There was small chance to make it a leave-taking of even ordinary good fellowship beneath that dignified, quietly appraising eye, to say nothing of endowing it with a quality which should in some measure compensate for the fact that it might be a parting for a long time to come. However much or little the exchange of notes during these last weeks might have come to mean to Jordan King, aside from the diversion they had offered to one sorely oppressed of mind and body, he resented being now forced to those restrained phrases of farewell which he well knew were the only ones that would commend him to his mother's approval.
Mrs. Burns and Miss Linton rose to go, summoned by Red Pepper himself, who was to take them. In the momentary surge of greeting and small talk which ensued, King surreptitiously beckoned Anne near. He looked up with the direct gaze of the man who intends to make the most of the little that Fate sends him.
"Letters are interesting things, aren't they?" he asked.