“I don’t understand things, that’s all,” he confessed, “but I think I’m going to like it.”
“You find it a little too full of surprises? Oh, we all do at first! You see grandfather is seventy, and he never grew up, and mamma is just like him. And I—” She shrugged her shoulders and flashed a smile at her grandparent.
“You are wonderful—bewildering,” Deering stammered.
The old gentleman was inveighing at Hood upon America’s lack of mirth; the American people had utterly lost their capacity for laughter, the old man averred. Deering’s fork beat a lively tattoo on his plate as he attacked his caviar.
And then another girl entered and walked to the remaining vacant place opposite him.
“Smeraldina,” murmured the mistress of the house, glancing round the table, and calmly finishing a remark the girl’s entrance had interrupted.
Deering’s last hold upon sanity slowly relaxed. Unless his wits were entirely gone, he was facing his sister Constance. She wore a dark gown, with white collar and cuffs, and her manner was marked by the restraint of an upper servant of some sort who sits at the family table by sufferance. He was about to gasp out her name when she met his eyes with a glinty stare and a quick shake of the head. Then Pierrette addressed a remark to her—kindly meant to relieve her embarrassment—referring to a walk over the hills they had taken together that afternoon.
“Ah, Smeraldina!” cried Pantaloon, “how is that last chapter? Columbine refuses to show me any more of the book until it is finished. I look to you to make a duplicate for my private perusal.”
Here was light of a sort upon the strange household; its mistress was a writer of books; Constance was her secretary; but the effort to explain how his sister came to be masquerading in such a rôle left him doddering, and that she should refuse to recognize him—her own brother!
“If that new book is half as good as ‘The Madness of May,’” Pantaloon was saying, “I shall not be disappointed.”