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"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ... and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very famous person Miss Clara Martin." Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ... otherwise it fitted.
"Ann, I do wish you could have seen her in that frilled white thing with the two huge blue bows at the ends of the long plaits at my dinner-dance the other night, standing and looking at everybody with all the fascination and coquetry of of well, that little Golden Bird peeping at us from the left-hand corner of Mrs. Red Ally's right wing. Where did she get that frock?"
"I think I can answer for his coming." "Do you mean Jim Greatorex?" she said. "Yes." "What is it that he won't funk?" She looked from one to the other. Nobody answered her. It was as if they were, all three, afraid of her. "I see," she said. "If you ask me I think he'd much better not come." "My dear Gwenda " The Vicar was deferent to the power that had dragged Ally's confession from her.
"Well, now you do know, perhaps you'll be sorrier for Ally." "I am sorry for Ally. But I'm sorry for Papa, too. You're not." "I'd be sorry for him right enough if he wasn't so sorry for himself." "Gwenda, you're awful." "Because I won't waste my pity? Ally's got nothing He's got everything." "Not what he cares most for." "He cares most for what people think of him.
Instead of it they heard two doors open and Ally's voice calling to Greatorex in the hall. As the Vicar flung himself from his study into the other room he saw Alice standing close to Greatorex by the shut door. Her lover's arms were round her. He laid his hands on them as if to tear them apart. "You shall not touch my daughter until you've married her."
Uncle Tom didn't seem in the least haste now, and ever so many minutes ago he had said to her, "Well, good-by, Ally!" and rushed off as if there wasn't another minute to spare, not another minute; and here was a gentleman in front of her, saying to a friend of his at that very instant, "There's plenty of time; it's ten minutes before the cars start;" and then she heard a lady say to another lady, "There's no need of my leaving you yet; we've got oceans of time;" and all about her, Ally now noticed various groups of friends and relations lingering lovingly together until the last moment; and noting all this, a bitter little look came into Miss Ally's face, and a bitter little thought came into her heart, a thought that said tauntingly, "There, this shows you, Ally Fleming, what kind of relations you've got; this shows you how much they care for you!"
It required all Bunker's tact to revive his ally's damped enthusiasm, and even at breakfast next morning he referred in a gloomy voice to various premonitions recorded in the history of his family, and the horrible consequences of disregarding them.
Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's and all his own fluffy white progeny. With exceeding generosity he was not eating a grain himself, but scratching and chortling encouragingly. "I knew you were not like other chicken men, Mr.
And he hasn't turned up. And you can't think why. Isn't that so?" "I don't know what you mean, Papa." "I mean, my child, that you're living in a fool's paradise." "I haven't a notion what you mean by that." "Perhaps Gwenda can enlighten you." The color died in Ally's scared face. "I can't see," she said, "what Gwenda's got to do with it."
So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally's mind, struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of her father's death, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life itself.
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