"Old Mother Gibson's savior was a dandy—
He thought he'd buy the Madigans with a stick of candy!"
sang Split, and the parlor yelled itself hoarse with uproarious delight.
The fat little girl at the piano began to play, and stopped several times, that she might wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and get her breath. At last, with a squaring of her shoulders and a stiffening of backbone that seemed queerly familiar to Morgan, watching outside, she half drawled, half sang, with an unmistakable accent:
"Old Mother Gibson was angry at the Fates;
My word! They sent the savior 'way out to the States!"
A sudden enlightenment came to Miles Morgan. For a moment the red flamed up in his cheek, and if Split could have seen his face she might have fancied that some imp had caught her likeness, when her temper had got beyond her control, and set it on this man's body.
"The impudent little beggars!" Morgan cried furiously. "My word!" He stopped, remembering the use to which his favorite exclamation had been put. "But what a saucy lot!" He was laughing before he had finished wording his thought.
He was interested now, and listened with a grin to Fom's declaration that
"Old Mother Gibson ought to've known better
Then to come in answer to Aunt Anne's letter."
He saw even Frank strutting in the ring, though she was capable only of a repetition of the classic phrase with which each couplet began. And he laughed with the rest at Bep,—poor, unready Bep, set as by a musical time-lock and bound to go off,—getting slower and slower in motion as well as utterance, the accompaniment retarding sympathetically as the critical moment approached when she must be delivered of her rhyme.
"Old Mother Gibson, why do you—"