"I'm glad to see you, too, Nick," she says, and walked along on the inside of the walk with us, just drooping!
Yes, you might as well have tried to greet a fountain in full play as to greet him. He invited her to come to his luncheon next day. She said she would, with a nice little catch of pleasure in her tone; and he left her at her gate, him bowing tremendous. And it was the same gate he used to take her to when they were boy and girl....
He said the same kind of a formal good night to me at my gate; and I was just going to go into my house, feeling sick and lonesome all rolled into one, because there wasn't a mite of Nick Nordman about him at all; but all of a sudden, like an explosion out of a clear sky and all points of the earth, there came down onto us the most tremendous, outrageous racket that ever blasted a body's ears. It seemed to come from sky, earth, air and sea, at one and the same instants. And it went like this:
S——s——s!
Yow! Yow! Yow!
Who's——all——right?
Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
And then there was a great burst of yelling, and the whole seven boys came dropping out of trees and scrambling up from under the fence, and they ran off down the street, still yelling about him. Seems the ice-cream cones had made a hit.
Then—just for one little minute—I saw the real Nick Nordman that I remembered. His face broke into a broad, pleased grin, and he shoved his hat onto the back of his head, and he slapped his leg so that you could hear it. "Why," says he, "the durn little kids!"
We all dressed up in the best we had for the luncheon. Lucy Hackett come for me. She had on a clean, pretty print dress, and she looked awful nice.