Within two weeks, Mr. Morpeth found himself entangled in a flirtation such as he had never dreamed of. Miss Flossy’s scheme had succeeded only too brilliantly. The whole hotel was talking about the outrageous behavior of “that little Belton girl” and Mr. Morpeth, who certainly ought to know better.
Mr. Morpeth had carried out his instructions. Before the week was out, he found himself giving the most life-like imitation of an infatuated lover that ever delighted the old gossips of a Summer-resort. And yet he had only done what Flossy told him to do.
He got his first lesson just about the time that Flossy, in the privacy of their apartments, informed her elder sister that if she, Flossy, found Mr. Morpeth’s society agreeable, it was nobody’s concern but her own, and that she was prepared to make some interesting additions to the census statistics if any one thought differently.
The lesson opened his eyes.
“Do you know,” she said, “that it wouldn’t be a bit of a bad idea to telegraph to New York for some real nice candy and humbly present it for my acceptance? I might take it—if the bonbonnière was pretty enough.”
He telegraphed to New York and received, in the course of four or five days, certain marvels of sweets in a miracle of an upholstered box. The next day he found her on the verandah, flinging the bonbons on the lawn for the children to scramble for.
“Awfully nice of you to send me these things,” she said languidly, but loud enough for the men around her to hear—she had men around her already: she had been discovered—“but I never eat sweets, you know. Here, you little mite in the blue sash, don’t you want this pretty box to put your doll’s clothes in?”
And Maillard’s finest bonbonnière went to a yellow-haired brat of three.
But this was the slightest and lightest of her caprices. She made him send for his dog-cart and his horses, all the way from New York, only that he might drive her over the ridiculous little mile-and-a-half of road that bounded the tiny peninsula. And she christened him “Muffets,” a nickname presumably suggested by “Morpeth”; and she called him “Muffets” in the hearing of all the hotel people.