The Daughters of the Little Grey House

by Marion Ames Taggart

Demetrius Dennis beamed on the indignant lady with an indulgent and approving smile. "My dear madam," he said, "I see that you have an eye for business, and there is nothing that I do so admire as business sense. It is right for you to hold out for as large a price as you can get, and of course the more you seem not to care to sell, the more likely we are to persist and come down with something handsome. Something handsome it will be, I assure you, Mrs. Grey, and that I have told you frankly from the beginning. It has never come in my way to notice that people wouldn't sell in the end if they got what they wanted for their stuff. We shall not balk at a good price, because the collection includes so much that it will be worth our while to take it entire, and I don't mean that any other dealer shall get it."

There was a certainty of common understanding in the man's manner that disarmed Mrs. Grey's indignation as it stirred her sense of humor. It was perfectly evident that he considered himself her benefactor, and felt sure that, after some necessary delays for finesse, the furniture would be his. Whereat not only he would be entirely happy but he would leave the Greys even more so in the possession of a check large enough to furnish the little house over again in shining, highly varnished newness.

Her eyes softened into a laugh of pure amusement, which she prevented from reaching her lips, but Wythie and Rob were too young to be tolerant of impertinence, and Rob's eyes emitted an indignant flash as she said sternly: "You have heard my mother's order to leave the house. She has told you that its contents are not for sale. You will immediately obey her: there is the door."

"Now, why should you be huffy, my dear young lady?" began Mr. Dennis, reasonably. "Can't you see it's for your advantage to sell, and don't you suppose that I don't want to go back to town and report a failure? I don't generally fail, you know, when my head sends me out to buy for him."

"Nevertheless you have failed this time," said Rob. And gentle Oswyth added as she set the front door back: "Leave the house at once, sir. You are not to discuss the subject, nor be so impertinent as to assume that my mother means less than every syllable that she has uttered."

Here Lydia stepped to the fore. "This gentleman has left his hat in the kitchen. Come back the way you come in, sir, and I will hand it to you."

Demetrius Dennis, who looked much chagrined—even wounded—by the girls' sternness, turned to Lydia with a grateful smile. "No offence meant, I don't see why there should be any taken," he said. "If you insist on keeping the stuff, and on me going, there isn't anything else to be done but to let you keep it, and to go. But you don't know how hard it is for me to believe you'd refuse the offer I'd have made. Say, I'll leave that card with you, and if you change your mind when you talk it over around the evening lamp to-night—as you may you know, as you may—why a postal card dropped to me at that address will fetch me out here right away. You hadn't ought to be angry, madam; it's all in the way of business."

"I see that you consider it so. Another time you would be wiser to hesitate before you intrude. At least find out if you may inventory people's property. It doesn't matter. Lydia, take him safely out beyond Ben Bolt who evidently shares our prejudices against too great a disregard of private rights." And Mrs. Grey's lips twitched at the memory of the picture Mr. Demetrius Dennis had presented on their first glimpse of him.

"I wish you good-morning, ladies," said that individual with a bow comprehensive of the irate younger ones, and the amused elder ladies. Then he followed Lydia to the kitchen in pursuit of his hat, and after an unaccountable delay they saw him crossing the orchard in Lydia's wake, who preceded him as a bulwark against Ben Bolt.

At the rear gate their handmaid lingered long; the Greys saw her engaged in earnest conversation with the Graeco-Hibernian. By this time even Rob's indignation at his impertinence had given way to her sense of the ridiculous, and Mrs. Grey, Miss Charlotte, and the two girls were in the full tide of peals of laughter when Lydia reappeared to rebuke them tacitly by her gravity of demeanour, beneath which gleamed something like self-satisfaction.