CHAPTER XVII.
MR. JORDAN HEARS A STORY.
The children were delighted with the news of their mother’s speedy return. During her long absence all grievances had been forgotten, and they only remembered that the absent mother, whom they loved, was coming back to them.
All through the house was a flutter of excitement, which even the servants were unable to escape. Mary Louise, like the sweet and dainty house-fairy she was, wandered through her mother’s long deserted rooms, putting everything in order with a discretion and taste that was essentially womanly. And Annabel prepared vases of her mother’s favorite flowers, whose fragrance would be sure to prove a tender greeting to the returned traveller. Even little Gladys insisted on helping “to get ready for mamma,” although her sisters would gladly have dispensed with her assistance.
Annabel had another source of pleasure, for her father had said, rather briefly but with an odd look in his eyes: “Will is coming back with your mother, although it is sooner than I had expected him.”
She knew from the gravity of his voice that he did not wish to be asked questions, so she only smiled happily at the news, and kissed him.
Over at the Carden cottage Mr. Jordan was having a restless night. He returned from his evening walk as usual, but when he had locked himself in his room he began pacing the floor restlessly, a thing which Mrs. Carden, who could hear his footsteps plainly, did not remember that he had ever done before.
Had anyone been able to peep within the room—which no one ever could—he would have found the secretary’s thin face distorted by a wrathful scowl. Indeed, Mr. Jordan was not at all pleased with the way things were going at the mills. Mr. Williams’s evident repugnance to him, which had been growing for some time, and his flat refusal that day to confer with his secretary, had awakened in the man vague misgivings for which he could not account. And then that discovery by Mr. Williams of the English steel made by the Carden process was liable to precipitate a crisis.