“Oh, thank you!” she cried. “I
know this naughty boy must have been terribly hard
to find. Mildred’ll never forgive
me! I’ve put you to so much——”
“Not at all,” he said, amiably, and went
away, leaving the brother and sister together.
“Walter, let’s dance just once more,”
Alice said, touching his arm placatively. “I
thought—well, perhaps we might go home
then.”
But Walter’s expression was that of a person
upon whom an outrage has just been perpetrated.
“No,” he said. “We’ve
stayed this long, I’m goin’ to wait
and see what they got to eat. And you look here!”
He turned upon her angrily. “Don’t
you ever do that again!”
“Do what?”
“Send somebody after me that pokes his nose
into every corner of the house till he finds me!
‘Are you Mr. Walter Adams?’ he says.
I guess he must asked everybody in the place if they
were Mr. Walter Adams! Well, I’ll bet
a few iron men you wouldn’t send anybody to
hunt for me again if you knew where he found me!”
“Where was it?”
Walter decided that her fit punishment was to know.
“I was shootin’ dice with those coons
in the cloak-room.”
“And he saw you?”
“Unless he was blind!” said Walter.
“Come on, I’ll dance this one more dance
with you. Supper comes after that, and then
we’ll go home.”
Mrs. Adams heard Alice’s key turning in the
front door and hurried down the stairs to meet her.
“Did you get wet coming in, darling?”
she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
“Just lovely!” Alice said, cheerily, and
after she had arranged the latch for Walter, who had
gone to return the little car, she followed her mother
upstairs and hummed a dance-tune on the way.
“Oh, I’m so glad you had a nice time,”
Mrs. Adams said, as they reached the door of her daughter’s
room together. “You deserved to,
and it’s lovely to think——”
But at this, without warning, Alice threw herself
into her mother’s arms, sobbing so loudly that
in his room, close by, her father, half drowsing through
the night, started to full wakefulness.
On a morning, a week after this collapse of festal
hopes, Mrs. Adams and her daughter were concluding
a three-days’ disturbance, the “Spring
house-cleaning”—postponed until now
by Adams’s long illness—and Alice,
on her knees before a chest of drawers, in her mother’s
room, paused thoughtfully after dusting a packet of
letters wrapped in worn muslin. She called to
her mother, who was scrubbing the floor of the hallway
just beyond the open door,
“These old letters you had in the bottom drawer,
weren’t they some papa wrote you before you
were married?”
Mrs. Adams laughed and said, “Yes. Just
put ’em back where they were—or else
up in the attic—anywhere you want to.”
“Do you mind if I read one, mama?”
