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Max was an ugly old gossip, but Betty need not have confided this opinion to Serena and Letty as they happened to look out of the kitchen windows, to see Mrs. Max go by. Betty had succeeded in being blameless until past six o'clock that day, and it was the fifth day of trial; lost now, and black-marked like those that had gone before.
"Serena, don't interrupt me," he ordered. "Gertie, listen. I'm goin' to tell you both a story. Once there was a couple of married folks that had a daughter.... Hush, I tell you! Listen, both of you. I AIN'T crazy. If ever I talked sense in my life I'm talkin' it now.... This couple, as I say, had a daughter. This daughter was engaged to be married.
The disclosure which, on the impulse of the moment, he had been about to make was, for him, a serious one. He had written the letter "on his own hook," without telling his wife of his action. What would she say if he told her now, so long afterward? "You've done? What have you done?" asked Serena sharply. The captain still hesitated.
The captain derived some satisfaction from the talk; it seemed to him that their daughter's declaration of independence had startled Serena somewhat. She even went so far as to admit that, in spite of Mrs. Black's explanations and gracious commendations, she, herself, had not been impressed by Miss Canby's guests. She and Gertrude would have an interview in the morning, she declared.
Once Lockley saw a faint glow in the sky and clenched his teeth. He turned away from it at the first opportunity. The glow could be Serena, and he could have been forced back toward it by the windings of the highway he'd followed without lights. Twice Jill warned him of beams across the highway. Once, driven by his increasing anxiety, his brakes almost failed to stop him in time.
Serena began by asking, with a roguish look. "Pooh! What is such stuff to me?" "I knew I should tease you. What do you think of Mr. Quarrier's chances?" "Oh, he will be elected, no doubt." Glazzard spoke absently, his eyes on Serena's face, but seemingly not conscious of her expression. "I hope he will," she rejoined. "What! you hope so?" "Yes, I do. I am convinced he is the right man.
Excitement to-night she was very much excited invariably produced in Serena an effect of clutching at her long-departed girlhood, an effect sufficiently pathetic in the case of a woman well on in the forties.
It was nearly three o'clock when he presented his card, with a message pencilled upon its back, to the aged doorkeeper who drowsed in the alley which led to the stage entrance of the Warburton Theater, just off Broadway near Times Square, and fifteen minutes later he was being received in the star's dressing-room by Serena Hart herself.
Never had Serena presented so bold a front to her philanthropic and very possessive elder sister. Never had she enjoyed so much attention in the small and rigidly select circle of Slowby society, in which she and Miss Susan moved. Serena spoke with authority upon all subjects, on the strength of a purely fictitious affair of the heart.
"Now don't you tell me you don't get them batter puddings a sight better in the dwellings of the rich and great," insisted Serena, with great complacency. "Setting down to feast with lords and dukes, same's you do, you must eat of the best the year round. We do season the sauce well, I will allow. Miss Barbara, she always thinks it may need a drop more."
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