Nancy flushed angrily. It was hardly polite of Timothy Peppercorn not to meet her at the door. She wondered at Miss Campbell for permitting such rudeness. She wondered at herself for enduring it. And she rang the bell again so hard that it came out by the roots and dangled at the side of the door, disqualified for useful service ever again; but her blood was up now, and flinging the door wide open with a gesture of haughty exasperation, she ran upstairs as fast as she could.
She paused at the first open door on the upper landing, where there continued to issue a loud volume of sound; a chorus of robust tenors, baritones and basses, all mingling in one enormous, crushing wave of harmony:
“Bang-bang, how the tom-toms thundered!
Bang-bang, how they thumped the gongs!
Bang-bang, how the people won——”
Nancy walked timidly into the room. Through a haze of tobacco smoke as thick as a London fog she made out some hundreds of young men, more or less. At least it seemed to her an immense number. As a matter of fact, there were only eight of them sitting about on the table and benches. And from the mouth of each young man there poured forth a pillar of smoke as from the chimney of a factory.
When Nancy stood framed in the doorway like an unexpected apparition of spring, the silence of the tomb fell on the company.
CHAPTER XV.—NANCY AND HER CAVALIERS.
Eight briarwood pipes were instantly removed from eight mouths opened wide with astonishment, and seven painfully embarrassed young men withdrew into a corner of the room behind the table, as if Nancy had been an object to flee from. The one young man who remained in the foreground to face the danger reminded her of the poor craven bridegroom who said never a word, in “Lochinvar.”
“Why, I thought——” began Nancy Brown and paused. Perhaps she had mistaken the room. “Didn’t you call to me to come up?” she asked the cowardly creature who looked as if he preferred death to the torture he was now enduring.
“I beg your pardon,” he replied, in an excessive state of embarrassment, “I believe I did.”
“But you were not expecting me?”