Daisy, letting the unreceived hand hang before her, held out and humorously pendent, looked after her vanishing escort contemplatively.
"Hmf!" she said, "no date, no nothing. Oh, well—he'll be back, if," she flushed a little, "if he wasn't fooling. I don't care, anyway."
CHAPTER VIII. A Knight in the Kitchen.
Daisy went lightly and swiftly along the gravelled walk on her return to the side-door of the great Harrison house. Her mind kept returning to certain events of the meeting, giving them a romantic tinge—the cafe, with its quiet and rich appointments and the stupendous prices named on its menu for even the ordinary things; the waiter, looking straight before him, feature-fixed as a Teddy-bear; and, most of all, the presiding spirit, the polished and pleasant man who had talked so simply and companionably and yet who, in certain unexplainable ways, had unconsciously suggested that he was "somebody great." With the whole city yet new to her—new and unexplored and fascinating—the experience through which she had just passed seemed like a chapter out of a book or a scene out of a picture-play. Looking back upon the affair now, Daisy was most amazed at her own part in it—at the strong and sane impulse which had caused her to "turn down" a proposal that, she somehow felt, if made again now, she would accept and with that acceptance drift unresistingly along the tide of a life turned to story.
"I should have taken him," Daisy murmured to herself, as she turned softly the knob of the side door of Harrison's, "while I had the chance. He would have turned out all right, for he's a gentleman, and he's old enough to know his own mind."
A thin thread-line of illumination at the bottom of the inner door showed that there was a light in the Harrison kitchen. Daisy was glad Jean had remained up for her; for, although she knew the way to the bedroom, she felt a little like a thief, prowling around the big house, on this her first unfamiliar night in it.
She opened the kitchen door. The snarl of a heavy foot turning on linoleum followed the click of the latch. Daisy saw that the tenant of the kitchen was not Jean, but Sir Thomas Harrison himself, standing in his shirt-sleeves near the faucet, drawing some water in a tumbler. Sir Thomas did not look so young with his tailor-built coat off. The slight sag in the shoulders and bulge at the waist became apparent when in his shirt-sleeves.