Thus it was that, on the morning after this dialogue, a clean-built young fellow walked along West Sixteenth Street, appreciatively sniffing the sunny crispness of the May air. He was rather shabby looking, yet his demeanor was by no means shabby. It was confident and easy. On the evidence of the bandbox which he carried, his mission should have been menial; but he bore himself wholly unlike one subdued to petty employments. His steady, gray eyes showed a glint of anticipation as he turned in at the gate of the high, broad, brown house standing back, aloof and indignant, from the roaring encroachments of trade. He set his burden down and, pulled the bell.
The door opened promptly to the deep, far-away clangor. A flashing impression of girlish freshness, vigor, and grace was disclosed to the caller against a background of interior gloom. He stared a little more patently than was polite. Whatever his expectation of amusement, this, evidently, was not the manifestation looked for. The girl glanced not at him, but at the box, and spoke a trifle impatiently.
“If it’s my hat, it’s very late. You should have gone to the basement.”
“It isn’t, miss,” said the young man, in a form of address, the semi-servility of which seemed distinctly out of tone with the quietly clear and assured voice. “It’s the insects.”
“The what?”
“The bugs, miss.”
He extracted from his pocket a slip of paper, looked from it to the numbered door, as one verifying an address, and handed it to her.
“From yesterday’s copy of the Banner, miss. You’re not going back on that, surely,” he said somewhat reproachfully.
She read, and as she read her eyes widened to lakes of limpid brown. Then they crinkled at the corners, and her laugh rose from the mid-tone contralto, to a high, bird-like trill of joyousness. The infection of it tugged at the young man’s throat, but he successfully preserved his mask of flat and respectful dullness.
“It must have been Uncle,” she gasped finally. “He said he’d be quits with the real estate agent before he left. How perfectly absurd! And are those the creatures in that box?”