“Upon my word, she is uncommonly kind!” said Galahad, with emphasis stronger than Laura’s italics.
“Yes, isn’t she?” responded Laura, whose sense of humor was obscured by predilection. “They ride and drive the horses, and give Holt and the gardeners advice, and they exercise the automobiles, and run the electric launch about, and play tennis and croquet——”
“And the devil generally!” were the words that Galahad bit off and gulped down.
He was very quiet at dinner, sitting in the deceased Kingdom’s place at the foot of the table. And Dosy and Brosy were very loud and very large, though looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly well in evening garb. They made themselves very much at home upon Laura’s right and left hand, recommending certain dishes to each other, criticizing more, ravaging the bonbons, reveling in the dessert, calling, with artless airs of connoisseurship, for special wines laid down by the noble man who yet had not known how to awaken the deeper chords of passion.
“Gad! what a pair of hawbucks!” Galahad mentally ejaculated as the servants ran about like distracted ants, and Laura and Laura’s inseparable though elderly companion-friend, Miss Glidding, vied with each other in encouraging Theodosius and Ambrose to renewed attacks upon the strawberries and peaches.
Left alone with Dosy and Brosy, he submitted to be patronized, offered cigars he had chosen, recommended to try liqueurs with whose liverish and headachy qualities he had been acquainted of old.
They walked with the ladies in the dewy rose-gardens after dinner, and as Galahad paused to light a cigar, behold, he was left alone. Laura with Brosy, Miss Glidding (who looked her best by bat-light) with Dosy, had vanished in the shadowy windings of the trellis-walks and arcades. And Captain Ranking, shrugging his shoulders, picked a half-seen Niphetos, glimmering among the wet, shining leaves, and walked back to the smoking-room, wondering why on earth Laura had dragged him down where he seemed least to be wanted. What was the matter “affecting her whole future” upon which she required advice? His heart gave a sickening little jog as he realized that the future of Dosy, or possibly of Brosy, might also be involved. True, Laura was thirty-nine; but what are years when the heart is young? Galahad asked himself, as peal after peal of the widow’s laughter broke the silence of the scented night. Other mental interrogations fretted his aching brain. What must the servants not have thought and said? What would the neighbors say? What would the County think of such sportive, not to say frivolous, conduct on the part of a widow but recently emancipated from weepers, whose handkerchiefs were still bordered with the inch-deep inky deposit of conjugal woe?
Kingdom was an easy-going, level-headed man, Galahad admitted, biting at one of the deceased’s Havanas and frowning; “but he would have raised the Devil over this. Possibly he’s doing it.”
The portrait of Mr. Kingdom over the mantelshelf of the smoking-room seemed to scowl confirmatively. The servants were all in bed, the promenaders in the garden showed no signs of returning. Galahad shrugged his little shoulders, and went away to bed in a charming, drum-windowed, chintz-hung bower over the front porch. And just as his little cropped head plumped down on the pillow it was electrically jolted up again. Laura was saying good-night in the porch to one—or was it both?—of the infernal twins. And before the hall-door clashed they had promised to come over to lunch to-morrow. Confound them! it was to-morrow now.
One has only to add that when, after exhausting watches, slumber visited Galahad’s eyelids, the twins in maddening iteration played dominoes throughout his dreams, to convince the reader that they had thoroughly got upon his nerves.