She sank helplessly into her chair.
A few minutes more of silence, and there was a rustling on the stairs. She started up, trembling, looked round, as if seeking some way of escape or some place to hide. Joe was in the doorway holding aside one of the curtains. There entered, in a beribboned and beflounced tea gown, a pretty, if rather ordinary, woman of forty, with a petulant baby face. She was trying to look reserved and severe. She hardly glanced at me before fastening sharp, suspicious eyes on Anita.
“Mrs. Ball,” said I, “this is Miss Ellersly.”
“Miss Ellersly!” she exclaimed, her face changing. And she advanced and took both Anita’s hands. “Mr. Ball is so stupid,” she went on, with that amusingly affected accent which is the “Sunday clothes” of speech.
“I didn’t catch the name, my dear,” Joe stammered.
“Be off,” said I, aside, to him. “Get the nearest preacher, and hustle him here with his tools.”
I had one eye on Anita all the time, and I saw her gaze follow Joe as he hurried out; and her expression made my heart ache. I heard him saying in the hall, “Go in, Allie. It’s O. K.;” heard the door slam, knew we should soon have some sort of minister with us.
“Allie” entered the drawing room. I had not seen her in six years. I remembered her unpleasantly as a great, bony, florid child, unable to stand still or to sit still, or to keep her tongue still, full of aimless questions and giggles and silly remarks, which she and her mother thought funny. I saw her now, grown into a handsome young woman, with enough beauty points for an honorable mention, if not for a prize—straight and strong and rounded, with a brow and a keen look out of the eyes which it seemed a pity should be wasted on a woman. Her mother’s looks, her father’s good sense, a personality got from neither, but all her own, and unusual and interesting.
“From what Mr. Ball said,” Mrs. Ball was gushing affectedly to Anita, “I got an idea, that—well, really, I didn’t know what to think.”
Anita looked as if she were about to suffocate. Allie came to the rescue. “Not very complimentary to Mr. Blacklock, mother,” said she, good-humoredly. Then to Anita, with a simple friendliness there was no resisting: “Wouldn’t you like to come up to my room for a few minutes?”