"N-no, not exactly," said the man, studying his well-kept finger-nails. "I can't say I do. No, my business is with—is more—"
He stopped suddenly and followed the direction of Caroline's eyes.
There on the sideboard behind him stood a leather suit-case, long and solid looking. It was open and tight rows of forks and spoons filled it.
The room was quite still for a moment. Caroline wanted to show by some intelligent remark that she understood the situation, and could easily imagine what the man was doing with the silver, but she found this difficult.
Strange people came to Aunt Edith's house. Dark, foreign-looking men ate meals there at unusual hours; once Caroline had seen with her own eyes a plump, yellow German fall suddenly on his knees at Aunt Edith's feet, as a hand-organ struck up its brassy music under the window, and burst into passionate singing, waving a whisk-broom in the air and offering it to Aunt Edith with the most extraordinary force of manner. And her aunt, who wore at the time a raincoat and tam o'shanter cap, had leaned forward graciously, gurgled out a most delicious little tune, accepted the whisk-broom, affected to inhale its fragrance rapturously, and whirled into a big and beautiful song in which the plump, yellow gentleman joined, and rising seized her in his arms, at which point they drowned the hand-organ completely, and the hand-organ man and Uncle Joe applauded loudly, and they gave the hand-organ man all he could eat and a dollar.
You may see from this that one did not look for the commonplace in Aunt Edith's house. Moreover, the stranger was not unlike some of her aunt's friends; though he was handsome and assured and noticeably at his ease, Caroline felt that his manner was subtly different from that of the friends of her own family. But even the most unconventional guest had never collected the sideboard silver, and a little feeling was growing in the air ... doubt and a bit of what might have begun to be fear ... when suddenly the man began to laugh. It was abrupt and it rang harshly at first, but grew with every moment warmer and more infectious, so that Caroline, though she felt that she was in some way the cause of it, joined in it finally, in spite of herself.
"If you knew what a sight you were!" he exclaimed, wiping his eyes with the napkin, "with your hair all cobwebs and all that dirt on your knees and those finger-marks on your apron, and being so small and all"—he began to chuckle again.
"Small?" she repeated portentously.
"Oh, I didn't mean small compared with—with anybody else the same size," he assured her quickly.