“Nowhere.” Then, seeing the driver’s puzzled look, “Anywhere,” the youth added merrily. “I’m come to do what I please, and stop where I please, and stay as long as I please. This is the loveliest place I have seen yet, and I must sketch it. Why, surely you have carried passengers before who had no settled destination, but liked to stop where it suited them.”
“Ye—es,” was the doubtful response. “Yes, mister. But never one quite like you. You’re a wide-awake chap and a merry, but you look as dainty as any city lady I ever met.”
The words were evidently taken as a compliment, in whatever way they might have been meant. The youth slung his knapsack over his shoulder, concealing the long name which had puzzled the driver for the whole journey—Van Stuyvesant Van Doorm—leaped lightly down from the coach almost before it stopped, doffed his cap courteously, and with a gay farewell was on his way along a narrow path to the house.
A woman, remarkable for nothing except her curiously total lack of anything noticeable, opened the door, but into that dull face an actual sunny gleam of pleasure came as soon as she saw the blithe young face before her. The descendant of all the Vans doffed his cap courteously again, with an answering gleam in his very brilliant eyes. He had been used all his life to know that people admired him, but it is to be acknowledged that this oft-repeated fact had never lost its charm.
“Is this Mrs. Escott?” he asked.
“I be,” was the succinct reply.
No faintest shadow of a smile betrayed her hearer’s amusement. He knew himself master already of the field. “If you please, Mrs. Escott,” he said audaciously, in his most captivating tone and with his most pleading, obstinate look, “I’m come to board with you.”
Mrs. Escott stared as one taken by storm and unable to collect her scattered forces. “But—but,” she stammered, “we never take boarders, we don’t.”
“This exception will prove the rule, then,” quoth Van. “Oh! for shame, Mrs. Escott. You never would have the heart to turn me away from such a view as this. I want to sketch it, and I will give you a sketch of it, and pay you the highest board into the bargain.”
“But we an’t got nothing fit to board ye on.”