"'Master says if meat's wanted it must be paid for, and he does not hold with cheap cuts and long reckonings.' Drat the man! I hates the very sight of him," remarked Ann, wrathfully, to her usual confidante, Mrs. Muggins—for with toothache, a swollen face, and an irascible butcher, life was certainly not worth living.
"Then I will write to my—to the lady to-morrow." Both Mollie and Waveney noticed the little slip. "I wonder if he is married," Waveney said to herself. But Mollie's inward comment was, "Very likely Mr. Ingram is engaged, but he does not know us well enough to tell us so."
Mr. Ingram was trying to regain his airy manner, but a close observer would have detected how keenly he was watching the two girls as he talked. Nothing escaped him—the new hat trimmings, and the faded hat; Waveney's worn little shoe, and the white seams in Mollie's blue serge.
Cinderella—he always called her Cinderella to himself—was no whit smarter than she had been the other day; her hair was rather rough, as though the wind had loosened it. And yet with what ease and sprightliness they chattered to him! Their refined voices, their piquante, girlish ways, free from all self-consciousness, delighted the young man, who had travelled all over the world, and had not found anything so simple, and artless, and real, as these two girls. It was Waveney to whom he directed his conversation, and with whom he carried on his gay badinage; but when he spoke to Mollie, his voice seemed to soften unconsciously, as though he were speaking to a child.
CHAPTER X.
"IT IS THE VOICE OF SHEILA."
"In the grey old chapel cloister
I sit and muse alone,
Till the dial's time-worn fingers
Mark the moment when we twain
Shall in paradisal sunlight
Walk together, once again."
Helen Marion Burnside.
There was no doubt that both Waveney and Mollie found their guest amusing. His views of life were so original, and there was such a quiet vein of humour running through his talk that, after a time, little peals of girlish laughter reached Ann's ears. It was Mollie who first struck the key-note of discord.