Here there was a brief pause in the procession of visitors. Mrs. Blyth beckoned to Madonna, and began talking on her fingers.
“No signs of Zack yet—are there, love?”
The girl looked anxiously towards the window, and shook her head.
“If he ventures up here, when he does come, we must not be so kind to him as usual. He has been behaving very badly, and we must see if we can’t make him ashamed of himself.”
Madonna’s color rose directly. She looked amazed, sorry, perplexed, and incredulous by turns. Zack behaving badly?—she would never believe it!
“I mean to make him ashamed of himself, if he ventures near me!” pursued Mrs. Blyth.
“And I shall try if I can’t console him afterwards,” thought Madonna, turning away her head for fear her face should betray her.
Another ring at the bell! “There he is, perhaps,” continued Mrs. Blyth, nodding in the direction of the window, as she signed those words.
Madonna ran to look: then turned round, and with a comic air of disappointment, hooked her thumbs in the arm-holes of an imaginary waistcoat. Only Mr. Gimble, the picture-dealer, who always criticized works of art with his hands in that position.
Just then, a soft knock sounded at Mrs. Blyth’s door; and her father entered, sniffing with a certain perpetual cold of his which nothing could cure—bowing, kissing his hand, and frightened up-stairs by the company, just as his daughter had predicted.