“If you please,” assented Newmark gravely, his thin, shrewd face masking itself with its usual expression of quizzical cynicism.
“Step this way, please, and I'll call him,” requested his interlocutor, standing aside from the doorway.
Newmark entered the cool, dusky interior, and was shown to the left into a dim, long room. He perched on a mahogany chair, and had time to notice the bookcases with the white owl atop, the old piano with the yellowing keys, the haircloth sofa and chairs, the steel engravings, and the two oil portraits, when Orde's large figure darkened the door.
For an instant the young man, who must just have come in from the outside sunshine, blinked into the dimness. Newmark, too, blinked back, although he could by this time see perfectly well.
Newmark had known Orde only as a riverman. Like most Easterners, then and now, he was unable to imagine a man in rough clothes as being anything but essentially a rough man. The figure he saw before him was decently and correctly dressed in what was then the proper Sunday costume. His big figure set off the cloth to advantage, and even his wind-reddened face seemed toned down and refined by the change in costume and surroundings.
“Oh, it's you, Mr. Newmark!” cried Orde in his hearty way, and holding out his hand. “I'm glad to see you. Where you been? Come on out of there. This is the 'company place.'” Without awaiting a reply, he led the way into the narrow hall, whence the two entered another, brighter room, in which Grandma Orde sat, the canary singing above her head.
“Mother,” said Orde, “this is Mr. Newmark, who was with us on the drive this spring.”
Grandma Orde laid her gold-bowed glasses and her black leather Bible on the stand beside her.
“Mr. Newmark and I spoke at the door,” said she, extending her frail hand with dignity. “If you were on the drive, Mr. Newmark, you must have been one of the High Privates in this dreadful war we all read about.”
Newmark laughed and made some appropriate reply. A few moments later, at Orde's suggestion, the two passed out a side door and back into the remains of the old orchard.