"Thank you, James. Are they not friends of Miss Gertrude?"
James smiled in a manner which displayed a large capacity for pity.
"Well, sir, I shouldn't say they was exactly friends. No, sir, ner yet callers, sir. They're some of them Guilders."
Avery could not guess what Gertrude would have gilders in the drawing-room for at that hour, but decided to enter. "Mr. Avery;" said James, in his most formal and perfunctory fashion, as he drew back the portière and announced the new arrival No one would have dreamed from the stolid front presented by the liveried functionary, that he had just exchanged confidences with the guest.
"Let me introduce my friends to you, Mr. Avery," began Gertrude, and two figures arose, and from one came a gay little laugh, a mock courtesy, and "Law me! It's him! Well, if this don't beat the Dutch!"
She extended her hand to him and laughed again. "We didn't shake hands last night, but now's we're regul'rly interduced I guess we will," she added.
Avery took her hand, and then offered his to her companion, and bowed and smiled again.
"Really, I shall begin to grow superstitious," he said, in an explanatory tone to Gertrude. "I came here to-night to see if I could arrange to have you three young ladies meet; to learn if there was a chance at the Guild to—"
"Oh," smiled Gertrude, beginning to grasp the situation. "How very nice! But these two are my star girls at the Guild now. We were just arranging some work for next week, but—"
"Yas, she wants to go down to that Spillini hole agin," broke in Ettie Berton, and Francis King glanced suspiciously from Gertrude to Avery. She wondered just what these two were thinking. She felt very uncomfortable and wished that he had not come in. She had not spoken since Avery entered, and he realized her discomfort.