“Bitters are best before meals,” said the boy, holding out his hand so invitingly that Pinkie pushed back her chair and came around the table to his side. As his lips touched her young, fresh cheek, he murmured, “You shall have it after dinner, Rosebud; I didn’t want it swamped in all that, and criticised by the whole tableful.”
Pinkie replied by a patronizing pat on the brown head, and returned to her seat quite content; for it would have cut her to the heart to be slighted by the cousin who, into the brotherly habitual affection and pity that belonged to him in right of their life together and his affliction, had contrived to infuse a piquant charm of his own.
Dessert was on the table when a slender gray figure knocked at the glass door opening into the garden. It was Louis’ usual entrance; for, as Freddy now occupied the doctor’s offices on the ground floor, it was more convenient to both. The back office had been turned into a bedroom, when it became difficult to manage the conveyance of the Ark up and down the stairway; the front room Freddy sat and painted in, except during office-hours, when he retired before the doctor’s patients; but these, though numerous, brought so little increase to the treasury that, to any others but Frederick Richards and his son, their number would have been positively disheartening.
Henry Randolph raised his eyebrows the barest line—just a shadow of a line—as the young shoemaker entered, and, though evidently just a little disconcerted at finding the family still at table, made his apology to Alice, and accepted a chair at Freddy’s side, and a portion of birthday ice-cream, as simply and easily as if his grandfather had “come over with King Charles,” like the “Spanyels.”
“I thought you would have finished,” said Louis, “but, of course, birthday wishes take some time,” and he bowed across the table to Pinkie, with a frank boyish smile. “If you are not tired of them, Miss Rose, I hope you will accept mine,” continued the boy with very pretty, old-fashioned courtesy. Frank scowled, and muttered something under his breath; but Mr. Randolph, whose own manners were justly celebrated, felt his heart warm towards the young man.
“It’s merely imitative, of course,” he said to himself. “He has had the same training as Fred, and does the trainers credit, I must say. If he were anything but a shoemaker,—and then that confounded ‘Prices,’—hotbed of Socialism that it is!—Good wishes, Mr. Metzerott, are among those good things one can’t have too much of,” said Mr. Randolph, aloud and benignly.
“Thank you,” said Pinkie distinctly at the same moment. She raised her eyes and gave him a long, full glance, with, perhaps, a certain consciousness in it, which had been entirely absent from his look at her; for the next moment both young faces glowed with a sudden and violent blush.
Mr. Randolph finished his ice-cream, and calmly took up his conversation with the master of the house at the very point where Louis’ entrance had interrupted it.
“American art,” he said, “has a great future before it; just now, of course, we are imitative—imitative! and yet we do show some symptoms of striking out a line of our own. There’s Quartley, now—he’s very American; and Rinehart, poor fellow!”
“I’m not a connoisseur,” said Dr. Richards, “but I never saw anything sweeter than Rinehart’s bust of his mother.”