That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician’s “Abracadabra!”
Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her sister’s charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: “Abbie darling! My darling Abbie!” while Abbie wept: “Mamise! Oh, my poor little Mamise!”
A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim, round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife’s arms for a sister-in-law.
Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
“Mamise!” she said. “I want you should meet my husbin’.”
“I’m delighted!” said Mamise, before she saw her sister’s fate. She was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock without reeling.
Jake’s hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his cordiality was sincere as he growled:
“Pleaster meecher, Mamise.”
He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle, and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and piece it together.
Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked: