He spoke a few genial words of farewell and proceeded to the drawing-room, where he rang the bell. Nothing ensuing, he went to the top of the kitchen stairs and called down.
“I say!” Silence from below. “I say!” fluted Mr. Braddock once more, and now it seemed to him that the silence had been broken by a sound—a rummy sound—a sound that was like somebody sobbing.
He went down the stairs. It was somebody sobbing. Bunched up on a chair, with her face buried in her arms, that weird girl Claire was crying like the dickens.
“I say!” said Mr. Braddock.
There is this peculiar quality about tears—that they can wash away in a moment the animosity of a lifetime. For years Willoughby Braddock had been on terms of distant hostility with this girl. Even apart from the fact that that affair of the onion had not ceased to rankle in his bosom, there had been other causes of war between them. Mr. Braddock still suspected that it was Claire who, when on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday he had called at Midways in a top hat, had flung a stone at that treasured object from the recesses of a shrubbery. One of those things impossible of proof, the outrage had been allowed to become a historic mystery; but Willoughby Braddock had always believed the hidden hand to be Claire’s, and his attitude toward her from that day had been one of stiff disapproval.
But now, seeing her weeping and broken before him, with all the infernal cheek which he so deprecated swept away on a wave of woe, his heart softened. It has been a matter of much speculation among historians what Wellington would have done if Napoleon had cried at Waterloo.
“I say,” said Mr. Braddock, “what’s the matter? Anything up?”
The sound of his voice seemed to penetrate Claire’s grief. She sat up and looked at him damply.
“Oh, Mr. Braddock,” she moaned, “I’m so wretched! I am so miserable, Mr. Braddock!”
“There, there!” said Willoughby Braddock.