Miss Hamilton paid no attention to her brother’s rising wrath—a nearer manliness than he often reached—and very little and cool attention to his words.
“I’d bring a breach-of-promise suit against him,” she went on, “if I had one iota to go on. But I haven’t. I haven’t a scratch of his pen. I’ve written him notes about all sorts of things, but he telephoned the skimpiest, formal answers—and rung off before I could get in three words. Sên King-lo has never danced with me,” her words trailed off in a smothered wail.
Reginald Hamilton was too disgusted to speak. He stood up roughly and turned towards the door.
Emmeline rolled over on her big prickly cushions, face down on them, but head held up, chin on folded arms; and she fixed her brother with an imperious look from light, narrowed eyes.
“Sit down,” she commanded. “I’ve got it! Sit down.”
But for once Reginald Hamilton faced his manlier sister squarely. “I won’t have you mixed up in it, Em. Anything else you like—but not your name mixed up with that Chink’s.”
Perhaps Emmeline recognized the affection that lay in his brotherly rage; for she said with another but not ill-natured sigh. “That’s all right, old bean. It wouldn’t work; so it isn’t our game. But, I’ve got it! Sit down.”
Reginald sat down.
CHAPTER XIX
An ominous silence reigned in the schoolroom, and Ivy—just home from a fashionable wedding at St. Aloysius—looked cautiously in, to see what mischief the children were doing.