“You will have no difficulty in finding your way,” Jack said. “I would come for you myself, but might not be able to leave the store at the hour.” Then, just before leaving, he added: “Suppose you make it one, instead of two, and lunch with Annie. That will please her vastly, she complains of eating alone so often.”
As there was no special reason why Edna should decline this invitation, she accepted it readily; and that night, just as she was falling away to sleep, and dreaming that she had more scholars than she could well manage, and that her debt to Roy was nearly paid, Jack was conferring with old Luna concerning the lunch of the next day.
“Get up a tip-top one, auntie,” he said, handing her a bill. “She was half-starved in the seminary, I’ll warrant, and I don’t believe those Danas know much about good cooking; anyway they fry their beefsteak, for I’ve smelled it, and that I call heathenish. So scare up something nice, irrespective of the expense.”
CHAPTER XIII.
JACK’S HOME.
Jack’s four rooms on the second floor, No. 30 —— street, though plain and poor, compared with the splendors of Oakwood, were very pleasant rooms at all times; and on the morning of the day when Edna was expected, they were swept and dusted, and put in order much earlier than was usual for Aunt Luna, who was not gifted with remarkably swift powers of locomotion.
The front room answered the double purpose of parlor by day and sleeping room by night, the bed disappearing in the shape of a broad, luxurious-looking sofa, or lounge, whose neat covering of green and white chintz, with the soft, motherly cushions, gave no hint of the bedding stowed carefully away beneath. The carpet also was green, of a light, cheerful pattern, while the easy chairs were covered with the same material. Plain muslin curtains were draped gracefully back from the windows, in one of which a bird-cage was hanging, and in the other a wire basket of moss, from which the German ivy hung in festoons, and then was trained back to the wall, making for both the windows a beautiful cornice, and reaching still further on to a pretty chromo which it surrounded with a network of leaves. Over the mantel was another and a larger-sized chromo, and on the wall opposite two or three first-class engravings. These, with a few brackets and vases, a book-case of well-chosen books, and a head of Schiller and Dante, completed the furniture of the room, if we except the bright fire blazing in the grate and the pretty lion’s-head rug lying before the fender.
To the left of the front windows was a door opening into the hall bedroom, Jack’s room, with its single bed, its strip of carpeting, its one chair, its little square stand, and on the wall a porcelain-type of Georgie, whose black eyes, though soft and beautiful, seemed to have in them a look of contempt, as if they scorned their humble surroundings.
A narrow passage, with closets and shelves on either side, divided the parlor from the room in the rear, which also did double service as dining-room and kitchen, where Luna baked, and washed, and ironed, and served her master’s meals with as much care and attention as if he had been the richest man in the city, and dined each day from solid plate.
Old Luna’s sleeping apartment was the little room or closet off from the kitchen, which she kept so neat and tidy that few would have shrunk from resting there in her easy chair, or even from sleeping, if need be, in her clean, wholesome-looking bed.