"By no means," he said. "Very likely I was wrong to say anything."
"You were not wrong!" retorted Millicent. "You were entirely right. You would have been justified in punishing the fellow as he deserved. It is others who are wrong. If he were not going, I would never stay to see repeated what I have witnessed in the last six months."
Mr. Fern seemed to have lost all ambition for controversy. His elder daughter's cutting words evidently hurt, but he would not reply.
Mr. Weil came to the rescue by introducing a new topic of conversation, that of a European tenor that was soon expected to startle New York. Daisy went to the piano, and played softly, talking in whispers to Roseleaf, who leaned feverishly over her shoulder. But she made no allusion to Hannibal, and he did his best to forget him.
"What do you make of that?" asked Mr. Weil, when he was in a railway car, on the way back to the city with his young friend. "A glorious chance for a novelist to find the reason that black Adonis is allowed such latitude."
But Roseleaf was not listening. He was thinking of a sweet voice that had said: "You are a dear boy and I love you!"
CHAPTER XIV.
"LET US HAVE A BETRAYAL."
Mr. Archie Weil had become quite intimate with Mr. Wilton Fern; so much so that he called at his office every few days, took walks with him on business errands, went with him to lunch (to the annoyance of Lawrence Gouger, who did not like to eat alone) and sometimes took the train home with him at night, on evenings when Shirley Roseleaf was not of the party. Everybody in the Fern family liked Archie. Even Hannibal, who had conceived a veritable hatred for Roseleaf, brightened at the entrance of Mr. Weil either at the house or office, the negro seeming to alternate between the two places very much as he pleased. Millicent liked him because he was so "facile," as she expressed it; a man with whom one could talk without feeling it necessary to pick each step. Daisy liked him because her father did, and because Roseleaf did, and because he treated her with marked politeness that had apparently no double meaning.