"Well, Sarah'll have to get cross," said the boy grimly; "and _I_'ll have to plug out and go for a quart of brick ice-cream and carry it home in all this heat; and Laura and you'll have to stand over the stove with Sarah; and father'll have to change his shirt; and we'll all have to toil and moil and sweat and suffer while Cora-lee sits out on the front porch and talks toodle-do-dums to her new duke. And then she'll have YOU go out and kid him along while----"
"HEDRICK!"
"Yes, you will!--while she gets herself all dressed and powdered up again. After that, she'll do her share of the work: she'll strain her poor back carryin' Dick Lindley's flowers down the back stairs and stickin' 'em in a vase over a hole in the tablecloth that Laura hasn't had time to sew up. You wait and see!"
The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon the seer's mother. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, protestingly.
"We really can't manage it. I'm sure Cora won't want to ask him----"
"You'll see!"
"No; I'm sure she wouldn't think of it, but if she does I'll tell her we can't. We really can't, to-day."
Her son looked pityingly upon her. "She ought to be MY daughter," he said, the sinister implication all too plain;--"just about five minutes!"
With that, he effectively closed the interview and left her.
He returned to his abandoned art labours in the "conservatory," and meditatively perpetrated monstrosities upon the tiles for the next half-hour, at the end of which he concealed his box of chalks, with an anxiety possibly not unwarranted, beneath the sideboard; and made his way toward the front door, first glancing, unseen, into the kitchen where his mother still pursued the silver. He walked through the hall on tiptoe, taking care to step upon the much stained and worn strip of "Turkish" carpet, and not upon the more resonant wooden floor. The music had ceased long since.
The open doorway was like a brilliantly painted picture hung upon the darkness of the hall, though its human centre of interest was no startling bit of work, consisting of Mr. Madison pottering aimlessly about the sun-flooded, unkempt lawn, fanning himself, and now and then stooping to pull up one of the thousands of plantain-weeds that beset the grass. With him the little spy had no concern; but from a part of the porch out of sight from the hall came Cora's exquisite voice and the light and pleasant baritone of the visitor. Hedrick flattened himself in a corner just inside the door.
"I should break any engagement whatsoever if I had one," Mr. Corliss was saying with what the eavesdropper considered an offensively "foreign" accent and an equally unjustifiable gallantry; "but of course I haven't: I am so utterly a stranger here. Your mother is immensely hospitable to wish you to ask me, and I'll be only too glad to stay. Perhaps after dinner you'll be very, very kind and play again? Of course you know how remarkable such----"
"Oh, just improvising," Cora tossed off, carelessly, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter. "It's purely with the mood, you see. I can't make myself do things. No; I fancy I shall not play again today."
There was a moment's silence.
"Shan't I fasten that in your buttonhole for you," said Cora.
"You see how patiently I've been awaiting the offer!"
There was another little silence; and the listener was able to construct a picture (possibly in part from an active memory) of Cora's delicate hands uplifted to the gentleman's lapel and Cora's eyes for a moment likewise uplifted.
"Yes, one has moods," she said, dreamily. "I am ALL moods. I think you are too, Mr. Corliss. You LOOK moody.
Aren't you?"
A horrible grin might have been seen to disfigure the shadow in the corner just within the doorway.
