Maurice, perched on the arm of his sister’s chair, fell into lively whispering—for, to Kathleen, almost before his mother, the boy was accustomed to carry his hopes and fears. To him also that evening had fallen a stroke of good fortune. Had not he heard from Mr. Malvolio, the art-critic of the Regulator, that —— had spoken to him of putting the illustrations of Horner’s book into the hands of “that young Blair?” And was not —— the member of the great publishing firm most to be relied upon for the distribution of covetable plums?
Mrs. Blair, glancing back as she went into the pantry to prepare for her oyster stew, thought the old clock under which her children sat—whose broad face had looked down for so many years on the councils of her family—had never seen a fresher, a more winsome pair, eager to confront the great world on their own account.
The father, affecting not to be conscious of Morry’s confidence to Kathleen, recalled the days when he had peeped in on them at early morning in their nursery, to find both youngsters sitting in the same crib, with heads together and tongues wagging industriously over their forecasts for a day, then as wide and broad to them as was the future now. Neither of his children, Terence decided with satisfaction, had parted with the simple straightforwardness of that primal period.
Mr. Malvolio, whose ring startled Maurice from his perch, and sent him to open the front door, considered himself well favored in being admitted to one of Blair’s little off-hand suppers. As the famous critic and dictator upon matters of pictorial art came into the room, his pallid, mask-like face, and snaky, black locks disheveled over a high forehead, suggested rather a ghost at the feast than a would-be reveler.
After him presently arrived Mr. Catullus Clarke, whose overcoat and galoches had but just been deposited in the little hall, when a third ring made itself audible.
“That’s Thorndyke, probably,” said Maurice, hastening away—the maid servants of the Blair household having been long abed and slumbering.
“Maurice has asked an important stranger to join us,” said Mrs. Blair, with a little air of apology to Malvolio.
“Thorndyke—I should think so,” said Malvolio, but interrupted himself upon the entrance of Kathleen’s “Raphael-faced” young man.
He had been going to say that Thorndyke was much oftener visible in houses of the Beaumoris variety than in the haunts of upper Bohemia, but this struck him as hardly a gracious observation, even among the easy-going Blairs.