It was on a wet and dreary morning that Mr. Mackenzie arrived in London; and as he was slowly driven through the long and dismal thoroughfares with their gray and melancholy houses, their passers-by under umbrellas, and their smoke and drizzle and dirt, he could not help saying to himself: “My poor Sheila!” It was not a pleasant place surely to live in always, although it might be all very well for a visit. Indeed, the cheerless day added to the gloomy forebodings in his mind, and it needed all his resolve and his pride in his own diplomacy to carry out his plan of approaching Sheila.
When he got down to Pembroke Road he stopped the cab at the corner and paid the man. Then he walked along the thoroughfare, having a look at the houses. At length he came to the number mentioned in Sheila’s letter, and he found that there was a brass plate on the door bearing an unfamiliar name. His suspicions were confirmed.
He went up the steps and knocked; a small girl answered the summons. “Is Mrs. Lavender living here?” he said.
She looked for a moment with some surprise at the short, thick-set man, with his sailor costume, his peaked cap, and his voluminous gray beard and shaggy eyebrows; and then she said that she would ask, and what was his name? But Mr. Mackenzie was too sharp not to know what that meant.
“I am her father. It will do ferry well if you will show me the room.”
And he stepped inside. The small girl obediently shut the door, and then led the way up-stairs. The next minute Mr. Mackenzie had entered the room, and there before him was Sheila, bending over Mairi and teaching her how to do some fancy-work.
The girl looked up on hearing some one enter, and then, when she suddenly saw her father there, she uttered a slight cry of alarm and shrunk back. If he had been less intent on his own plans he would have been amazed and pained by this action on the part of his daughter, who used to run to him, on great occasions and small, whenever she saw him; but the girl had for the last few days been so habitually schooling herself into the notion that she was keeping a secret from him—she had become so deeply conscious of the concealment intended in that brief letter—that she instinctively shrank from him when he suddenly appeared. It was but for a moment.
Mr. Mackenzie came forward with a fine assumption of carelessness and shook hands with Sheila and with Mairi and said, “How do you do, Mairi! And are you ferry well, Sheila? And you will not expect me this morning; but when a man will not pay you what he wass owing, it wass no good letting it go on in that way; and I hef come to London—”
He shook the rain-drops from his cap, and was a little embarrassed.
“Yes, I hef come to London to have the account settled up; for it wass no good letting him go on for effer and effer. Ay, and how are you, Sheila?”