"Don't you see that the class must be taught, and that two more little persons in it do not affect my work? Then it is settled. I heard you say the other day that your Polly would be ten years old to-day; will you send her up this afternoon? I should like her first lesson to be a birthday present—Penny too, of course." Mrs. Stewart looked as eagerly glad as if she had been ten years old that day herself, and Margery kissed her in spite of dignified tea drinkers who might wonder. "I'll telephone up to Gretta to bring down their white frocks and slippers," she said. "I shall have to send mother down to thank you; I can't. What time must the children come up?"
"At half past two, please. It's I who thank you for giving me such a pleasure," said the little dancing teacher.
"Gretta and Laura will be down long before that," said Margery. And she watched Mrs. Stewart away, thinking, "I never saw any one with quite her combination of sadness and brightness of expression. She is a dear little woman, as Aunt Keren said."
Mrs. Stewart had hardly disappeared before a shadow fell over the door-sill, a shadow that invariably struck the tea maidens as darker and more sinister than ordinary shadows. It was cast by the man in the cloak and sombrero, who instantly dispelled it by crossing the threshold in his own person, and dropping into the corner which the proprietors of the tea room reluctantly saw he was beginning to consider his own.
So regularly he came to occupy the chair and tiny table, just big enough for one, which stood here, that he had grown familiar to them all, but not more attractive than he was at first.
Happie came to bring him his tea. It was understood that she was to cope with the more difficult human problems, for she had a way with her that melted crankiness and might, perhaps, disarm unkindness, or convert wickedness—at least Margery believed so, though Happie, in turn, believed all things possible to Margery's loveliness.
"Where is your musician?" asked the mysterious man.
"She has not come yet; she will be here later," Happie replied. Then something in the man's face that she had not noticed in it before, nor stopped now to analyze, wistfulness that was not merely sadness, but emptiness, if one may so describe it, made her add the first voluntary remark she had ever addressed to this customer. "You are fond of music, aren't you?" she said.
"Fond of it? Are you fond of air, food, the earth, your life, child? Music is my life," he exclaimed with a gaunt look of passionate earnestness.