Tiptoeing to the door, he threw it open. There was a startled cry from without and an equally startled grunt from within. Chester Kent and Marjorie Blair stood face to face.
“I—I—I beg your pardon,” gibbered Kent, whelmed instantly in a morass of embarrassment. “I—I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Feminine-wise she built up her self-possession on the ruins of his. “I wonder,” she said with a smile, “whether I’m the worse-frightened one of us.”
“You see,” he said lamely, “it was so sudden, your—your coming that way. I didn’t expect you.”
“And for that reason you intend to bar me from the house? It’s quite disgustingly wet out here.”
With a muttered apology Kent stepped aside, and she entered. Even amid his ill-ease he could not but note how the girlish loveliness had ripened and warmed, yet without forfeiting anything of that quaint appealing wistfulness which made her charm unique. But there glinted now in her deep eyes an elfish spirit of mischief, partly inspired by the confusion of the helpless male creature before her, partly the reaction from the mingled dread and desire of the prospective meeting with Sedgwick; for she had come on a sudden uncontrollable impulse to see him, and would have turned and fled at the last minute had not Kent surprised her. Perhaps there was a little flavor of revenge for this, too, in her attitude toward him.
“What a surprise to find you here, Mrs. Kent!” she remarked sweetly. “Or are you calling youself Mr. Blair nowadays? And how is your poor ear?”
Chester Kent immediately seized that unoffending member and clung to it with much the lost and anguished expression of the pale martyr in the once popular Rock of Ages chromo. His tormentor considered him with malicious eyes.
“Did any woman ever say ‘Boo!’ to him suddenly, I wonder?” she mused aloud.
Like a saving grace, there came into Kent’s mind a fragment of The Hunting of the Snark, in which he had just been reveling. Said he gravely: