“He’s not a bit attractive,” Nina
was saying. “Quiet, and—well,
I don’t suppose he knows what he’s got
on.”
Wallie was watching Elizabeth.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, with
masculine fairness. “He’s a good
sort, and he’s pretty much of a man.”
He was quite sure that the look Elizabeth gave him
was grateful.
He went soon after that, keeping up an appearance
of gaiety to the end, and very careful to hope that
Elizabeth would enjoy the play.
“She’s a wonder, they say,” he said
from the doorway. “Take two hankies along,
for it’s got more tears than ‘East Lynne’
and ’The Old Homestead’ put together.”
He went out, holding himself very erect and looking
very cheerful until he reached the corner. There
however he slumped, and it was a rather despondent
young man who stood sometime later, on the center
of the deserted bridge over the small river, and surveyed
the water with moody eyes.
In the dusky living-room Nina was speaking her mind.
“You treat him like a dog,” she said.
“Oh, I know you’re civil to him, but
if any man looked at me the way Wallie looks at you—I
don’t know, though,” she added, thoughtfully.
“It may be that that is why he is so keen.
It may be good tactics. Most girls fall for
him with a crash.”
But when she glanced at Elizabeth she saw that she
had not heard. Her eyes were fixed on something
on the street beyond the window. Nina looked
out. With a considerable rattle of loose joints
and four extraordinarily worn tires the Livingstone
car was going by.
David did not sleep well that night. He had
not had his golf after all, for the Homer baby had
sent out his advance notice early in the afternoon,
and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour
when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to
retire early for the Monday washing, and the Sayre
butler was announcing dinner. Dick had come in
at ten o’clock weary and triumphant, to announce
that Richard Livingstone Homer, sex male, color white,
weight nine pounds, had been safely delivered into
this vale of tears.
David lay in the great walnut bed which had been his
mother’s, and read his prayer book by the light
of his evening lamp. He read the Evening Prayer
and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the
thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific
effect on him. But it was no good.
He got up and took to pacing his room, a portly, solid
old figure in striped pajamas and the pair of knitted
bedroom slippers which were always Mrs. Morgan’s
Christmas offering. “To Doctor David,
with love and a merry Xmas, from Angeline Morgan.”
