"Do you really mean that, Mrs. Kennaird?"
"I mean every word of it. Pride has had many falls to-day. I am not at all sorry."
"Thank you very much," he said; and then, as simply as a boy, he added: "I knew I should do it if I could stick on."
"That's why you won," she rejoined; "because you knew you would," and with a smile that he would never forget she passed on into the hall.
The "little widow" had awarded Benny his prize. He fell there and then to wondering if it were the last he would ever win from her.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING A DISOBLIGING GHOST
The "little widow" had come to Andana under the mistaken notion that it was a nook in the backwoods of Switzerland where none might discover her. She was very much astonished and not a little dismayed to discover a middle-class society of an exuberant order and a noisy frivolity which could not but amuse her.
In such a company it was hardly possible for her to remain undiscovered, and she had not been in the hotel many hours when that Admirable Crichton, Dr. Orange, invited her to his own table. There she speedily began to reign to the satisfaction of a little coterie of the elect. If she, in her turn, shrank from the greatness thus thrust upon her, she was grateful for the compliment, and hastened to accept it. She had been alone so many months—she who was but seven-and-twenty, and had the heart of a child.
It was a great dinner that night, and merry the mood of the company. The "little widow" herself wore a dress of black velvet with a glorious "what-do-you-call-it" of white silk beneath it, as Bob Otway told his sister when describing it. Her diamonds were undoubtedly magnificent. Obviously a woman of fashion and of the world, she racked the animosities of prim misses from the suburbs and positively exasperated their mammas. These were of the "blouse" order, and obviously sober both in the matter of habit and of fashion. They dined with their eyes upon the "little widow" and their ears bent to every breath of gossip which stirred in an atmosphere odorous of dinner and cheap scents.