"It will be best, I am convinced," she said, "to leave the item as it stood before Mrs. Sharpe's entrance. I will say, her unseemly entrance. Your own instinctive delicacy is so well known, Mr. Jordano——"
"Oh! grazier! grazier!" murmured Mr. Jordano, trying to bow gracefully, a difficult thing with a lady on either arm—"too much, Miss Almeria!"
"So well known," Miss Almeria repeated, with a gracious bend of her own stately head, "that all Cyrus will appreciate your motive for abstaining from comment upon what we have heard. If it proves true, we shall know it soon enough; if false——" Miss Almeria's gesture was eloquent as well as dignified.
"If false," cried Mr. Jordano,—they were now at Mr. Bygood's door, and the ladies withdrew their arms, enabling him to fling his cloak over his left shoulder with a noble gesture—"if false, it has no place in the columns of the Cyrus Centinel."
CHAPTER VIII
the trivial round
These things and many more happened in the winter; in February, to be exact. A month later, when I came to make my annual visit in beloved Cyrus, things had "simpered down," as Mr. Mallow said. The excitement of Kitty's arrival, followed by the nine days' wonder of Miss Johanna Ross's return, were—not forgotten, no indeed! but laid away in spiritual camphor, as it were, to be aired and shaken out from time to time.
"My dear," said Madam Flynt (one's first visit was always to Madam Flynt, one's second to the Misses Bygood: it was a Propriety of Cyrus!)—"it is not only that we could not get along without Kitty: we have forgotten that we ever did get along without her. She drives too fast; I go in fear of my life when we turn a corner; but except for that, it is an ideal arrangement."
"The dear Doctor always drove fast!" Miss Croly looked up pensively from her knitting. "I suppose Kitty learned it naturally from him."