“Cyrus! Royal! Got here at last? Oh! but this is jolly.”
“Neal, dear old boy, how goes it? Dol, you’re a giant. I wouldn’t have known you.”
Such were the most coherent of the greetings which followed, as two visitors, in travelling rig, their faces reddened by eight days at sea in midwinter, crossed the threshold.
There could be no difficulty in recognizing Cyrus Garst’s well-knit figure and speculative eyes, though a sprouting beard changed somewhat the lower part of his face. And if Royal Sinclair’s tall shoulders and brand-new mustache were at all unfamiliar, anybody who had once heard the click and hum of his hasty tongue would scarcely question his identity.
The Americans had steamed over the Atlantic amid bluster of elements, purposing a tour through southern France and Italy. And they were to take part, before proceeding to the Continent, in the festivities of an English Christmas at the Farrars’ home in Manchester.
“Oh, but this is jolly!” cried Neal again, his voice so thickened by the joy of welcome that—embryo cavalry man though he was—he could bring out nothing more forceful than the one boyish exclamation.
Dol’s throat was freer. Sinclair and he raised a regular tornado in the handsome hall. Questions and answers, only half distinguishable, blew between them, with explosions of laughter, and a thunder of claps on each other’s shoulders. When their gale was at its noisiest, Royal’s part of it abruptly sank to a dead calm, stopped by “an angel unawares.”
A girl of sixteen, with hair like the brown and gold of a pheasant’s breast, opened a drawing-room door, stepped to Neal’s side, and whispered,—
“Introduce me!”
“My sister,” said Neal, recovering self-possession. “Myrtle, I believe I’ll let you guess for yourself which is Garst and which is Sinclair.”