Under ordinary circumstances the introduction to Miss Jones would have been an agreeable incident in Mr. Grover’s career, and nothing further. He had met, he did not know how many hundred charming young ladies, several of whom had borne the name of Jones, and he had never been in the least disconcerted. In the present instance, however, he showed but imperfect control of his emotions. A guilty blush sprang to his cheeks, and he groped vainly in his embarrassment for the proper phrase wherewith to express his pleasure at making the lady’s acquaintance. Miss Jones, too, somehow, seemed ill at ease, and gazed at him with flaming cheeks and a puzzled, half-anxious look in her eyes. The Frau Professorin, who had probably expected a different denouement, looked disappointed, and the goddesses whispered to each other and tittered.
“You will excuse me for a few moments,” said the Frau Professorin; “the house needs my attention.”
Having learned all that she wished to know, she could afford to be generous. It was plain that the goddesses had displaced Miss Jones in her lover’s heart. Hence his annoyance and embarrassment. She could well appreciate his position and in her heart she began to relent toward him. Miss Jones had evidently, under the pretence of studying music, come to Leipsic, to look after her recreant adorer, whose silence had begun to alarm her. The goddesses, too, who had been initiated into the secret, arrived at similar conclusions, and proceeded to dislike the innocent Miss Jones with much vehemence. It was but with reluctance that they heeded their mother’s significant scowl and withdrew in her wake.
“Perhaps,” said Miss Jones, drawing a breath of relief as the last of the trains vanished in the doorway, “perhaps you would now have the kindness to tell me what this comedy means.”
Grover lifted his eyes and gazed at her; she was surpassingly lovely. A pair of frank, dark American eyes, half humorously challenging, put at once his embarrassment to flight, and made him feel a delicious nearness and kinship to their fair possessor.
“Miss Jones,” he said, answering promptly the humorous gleam in her eyes, “I shall have to make you a regular confession. I didn’t have the remotest idea of your existence.”
“Nor I of yours,” she responded quickly; “but what has that got to do with the comedy?”
“Everything. You know, I invented you.”
“You invented me?”