Gardiner walked around to the boarding-house with Burton, after giving a boy a quarter to deliver the trunk. Mrs. Goode, herself, answered the bell. She was a sprightly, motherly woman, with a quick step, a ready tongue, and a hearty laugh; hair that hinted of fifty, but a smile that said she was twenty-five; and, withal, not entirely blind to her own accomplishments.
“This is my new clerk, Mr. Burton, Mrs. Goode,” said Gardiner. “I brought him here because I knew the house you run. He has driven most of the day, and just needs one of your hot suppers to make him feel the luck he has in being one of Mrs. Goode’s boarders.”
“Well, I do give a good supper, if I say it myself,” said Mrs. Goode. “No hungry people in my house, if I know it. But you want to go to your room. Alice, show Mr. Butler to room sixteen. Sweet sixteen, I call it, and I always save it for the young men,” she added, with a coquettish glance at her new customer.
Alice Goode, aged eighteen, emerged from the dining-room, and Burton having been introduced, as “Mr. Garden’s new clerk,” she demurely led the young man upstairs. “I hope you will like your room,” she said, and, the business obligations of the situation discharged, continued, “Do you dance?”
“Why, a little,” Burton admitted. “But I never learned, properly. Just country dances, you know.”
“Gee, that’s all is any good, anyway. None of your city camel-strides for me, but a good turkey-in-the-straw alamen-lefter an’ you can count me in every trip. There’s a hop on at Grant’s to-night. Going?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t an invitation, and I don’t even know the people.”
“That don’t matter. There’ll be some loads goin’ out from town, an’ you better just roll into one of them. It’s about five miles, an’ the ride will be dandy. Besides, Grant’s are the best there is, an’ you’ll be as welcome as a rich sinner in church. The hoe-down is in honour of their niece, who has come out from the East, an’s goin’ to live with them. They say she’s pretty an’ a swell singer. It’ll be quite a show-ring affair, I expect, but all to the good.”
“Al-i-c-e!” cried her mother. “Set them good silver knives an’ forks, cause Mr. Burtle’s here, an’ get a two-step on yuh now or never a foot will yuh go to the dance to-night.”
Alice disappeared, and Burton was left to examine his quarters. They were small and cheaply furnished, but comfortable enough. “At any rate,” he soliloquised, “I shall not be very lonely, if Miss Alice is a sample of Plainville society.”