“That wouldn’t make no difference to that Porter. She’d pick on me just the same. But, if you care to risk it, Mr. Dingle, I’ll show you where it is. You’ll find the young person up there. She’ll tell you more about the child’s ’abits and daily life than I can.”
“Good enough,” said Steve.
He had not seen Mamie for some time, and absence had made the heart grow fonder. It embittered him that his meetings with her were all too rare nowadays. She seemed to have abandoned the practice of walking altogether, for, whenever he saw her now she was driving in the automobile with Bill. Keggs’ information about the new system threw some light upon this and made him all the more anxious to meet her now.
It was a curious delusion of Steve’s that he was always going to pluck up courage and propose to Mamie the very next time he saw her. This had gone on now for over two years, but he still clung to it. Repeated failures to reveal his burning emotions never caused him to lose the conviction that he would do it for certain next time.
It was in his customary braced-up, do-or-die frame of mind that he entered the nursery now.
His visit to Keggs had been rather a late one and had lasted some time before the subject of the White Hope had been broached, with the result that, when Steve arrived among the white tiles and antiseptics, he found his godson in bed and asleep. In a chair by the cot Mamie sat sewing.
Her eyes widened with surprise when she saw who the visitor was, and she put a finger to her lip and pointed to the sleeper. And, as we have to record another of the long list of Steve’s failures to propose we may say here, in excuse, that this reception took a great deal of the edge off the dashing resolution which had been his up to that moment. It made him feel self-conscious from the start.
“Whatever brings you up here, Steve?” whispered Mamie.
It was not a very tactful remark, perhaps, considering that Steve was the child’s godfather, and, as such, might reasonably expect to be allowed a free pass to his nursery; but Mamie, like Keggs, had fallen so under the domination of Lora Delane Porter that she had grown to consider it almost a natural law that no one came to see Bill unless approved of and personally conducted by her.
Steve did not answer. He was gaping at the fittings of the place in which he found himself. It was precisely as Keggs had described it, white tiles and all.