“Oh, yes she was. I saw the invitation myself,” Fred answered. “They have sent their regrets. Miss Grey told me so.”
“Knew they wasn’t wanted, and showed their good sense in declining,” the judge answered gruffly, while Fred looked at him in surprise.
“Not wanted! What is the matter with the Greys?” he asked, and the judge replied, “Prejudice, I suppose; all prejudice, most likely; but I don’t like the man, and never have.”
“Do you know anything against him?” Fred asked.
“Not a blessed thing, for sure. It’s all a surmise that there is something behind that smooth tongue and manner of his which takes the crowd. Nobody knows what he was before he came here, so poor that he lived in one of my tenements in White’s Row—cheapest place in town, where Nancy Sharp lives. Think of it!” and the judge looked at Fred as if White’s Row, and the tenement house and Nancy Sharp would settle the matter.
But Fred did not seem at all disconcerted. He was seeing all the time the face which had rested on his arm and the light in the beautiful eyes when they first opened and looked up at him.
“Nobody knows where the fellow got his money, so sudden, to start a bank with,” the judge went on. “Poor as Job’s turkey when he came here; clerked a little while in a grocery, I believe. Susan didn’t call on ’em. Then he went west, and after being away a spell came back rich enough to open a bank and build a fine house with a five hundred dollar piano and things to match, they say. I’ve never been inside, nor Susan either. Somehow or other a breath of something did get here about him, and I shall always believe him a gambler, though he did do the fair thing to-day, that’s a fact.”
The word gambler had a bad sound to Fred, for it recalled the dead face of one of his dearest friends, who, after a night’s debauch in some gambling den in the West, had taken his own life. But Mr. Grey was not proven to be a gambler because Judge White surmised it, and certainly Louie was not one, and, he said:
“The young lady is not to blame for what her father may be, and I wish very much for her to be here to-night, and so does my mother and Blanche and Herbert.”
At the mention of his son’s name the judge frowned gloomily.