“That will do, Hopeful. The omelette was like leather and don’t put flowers on my tray again.” Miss Clergy’s dismissal was as brusque as her greeting.
Below, Ali Baba and Hopeful exchanged opinions. After thirty some years of seclusion Abby Clergy had begun to care to hear of some one else.
“Well, if any one else could make her care, it would be Thurley,” Ali Baba deduced, while Hopeful paused in the wiping of the last pot to say sagely,
“If she could, she’d have Dan Birge blown off the face of the earth, just because he wants to marry Thurley.”
“Some wimmen takes it harder’n others,” muttered Ali Baba whose patience with Miss Clergy was not of the same duration as his cousin Hopeful’s.
For the first time in thirty-some years Abby Clergy actually opened the shutter of her window and let in the summer breeze. She drew a chair close beside it and rested her thin arms on the window ledge. A flush in the yellowed cheeks betrayed her excitement; her harsh voice was trying to hum the aria Thurley had sung so carelessly that afternoon. By chance it was the solo aria in the last opera Abby Clergy had seen. She had been escorted by Sebastian Gomez the pretender, and every one had turned opera glasses to look at this beautiful American girl who was to marry a supposedly dashing nobleman, according to newspaper gossips. What time and happenings had occurred since then! And Thurley, who had stirred the last spark of life in the embers of Miss Abby’s heart, was to marry a country bumpkin, a Birge, a storekeeper probably, a slangy, serge-suited, whistling nuisance with an odious bulldog and a new-fangled automobile—never! Not if the Clergy fortune could prevent it!
CHAPTER VII
Busied with her “penance” of quilting, the next day, Thurley was summoned by a peremptory rap at the side door. It was Ali Baba, his shabby silk hat laid across his heart after the fashion of pictures of cavaliers which he had chanced to see in old-time novels.