"Well, if you-have heard of it, my dear," her husband joked, "how widely known it must be! You ought to have heard of it; you've had enough checks on it, I'm sure!"
But Mrs. Floyd did not pursue the subject. She looked at her sister with that prim seriousness which means something on the mind—or on two minds—and her sister returned the look in kind; and they both looked in the same fashion back and forth between Walworth and his caller. Ann Wilde snapped the catch of her hand-bag once or twice, and glanced between times at some loose papers inside it. Ferguson, in the other room, thought he perceived the approach of a domestic crisis—a disputed dress-maker's bill, perhaps. Yet there might be other reasons. He knew that the cook was sometimes impertinent, and that the market-man now and then forgot to send the white-fish. He himself was a mere boarding bachelor, yet he had come to learn something of the relief which follows the shifting of a housekeeper's cares to the shoulders of the housekeeper's husband. Ferguson had relieved the tedium of many a half-hour by short-handing bits of dialogue that accompanied connubial spats between his employer and his employer's wife.
These signs and tokens were not lost on Ogden; he rose again to go. You were they lost on Floyd himself, whose apprehension of a bad quarter of an hour was heightened by the absence, as yet, of any exact data. He had no wish to hold the field alone, and he begged Ogden not to hurry his departure.
"Where are the girls?" he asked his wife. "I thought you said they came along with you."
"They did. They are in the building. They will be up in a few minutes. That child!—somebody ought to look after her."
"Then why not wait a little while?" Floyd suggested to Ogden. "My wife's affair won't take long. Ferguson, won't you just clear off that chair out there and find the paper? And now, what is it?" he asked the two women when they were left together.
[II]
"Well, Ann has heard from those Minneapolis people again. And she isn't any nearer making up her mind than before."
"Here's what they say," added his sister-in-law. She took a letter out of her bag and handed it to him.