"Miss Christie is a newspaper woman—traveling alone!"
The daughter, whom they addressed as "Hilda" made the announcement promptly, and her manner seemed to warn them that if they found this any just cause or impediment they were to speak now or else hereafter forever hold their peace.
"Indeed?" said the mother, looking over my clothes with a questioning air, which, however, did not disapprove. "Indeed?"
"My word!" said the father, also taking stock of me, but his glance got no further than my homesick face. "My word!"
But you are not to suppose from the tone that anything had gone seriously wrong with his word. He said it in a gently searching way, as an old grandfather, seeking about blindly on the mantlepiece might say, "My spectacles!"
So realistic was the impression of his peering around mildly in search of something that I almost jumped up from my chair to see if I could, by mistake, be sitting on his word.
"Isn't she young?"
His twinkling little gray eyes sought his wife's as if for corroboration, and she nodded vigorously.
"Indeed, yes, Herbert! But they shed their pinafores long before our girls do, remember!"
Then he turned to his daughter.