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"I'm a busy man," said I. "You must make my excuses to your wife. But in the evenings. Couldn't we get up a little theater-party Mrs. Ellersly and your daughter and you and I Sam, too, if he cares to come?" "Delightful!" cried he. "Whichever one of the next five evenings you say," I said. "Let me know by to-morrow morning, will you?"
She was like a statue of snow; she spoke not a word; if she lifted her eyes, I failed to note it. And when I was leaving I with my collar wilted from the fierce, nervous strain I had been enduring Mrs. Ellersly, in that voice of hers into which I don't believe any shade of a real human emotion ever penetrated, said: "You must come to see us, Mr. Blacklock. We are always at home after five."
Instead, she went into the next room. I followed, saw Mrs. Ellersly seated at the tea-table in the corner farthest from the library where her daughter and I had been negotiating. She was reading a letter, holding her lorgnon up to her painted eyes. "Won't you give us tea, mother?" said Anita, on her surface not a trace of the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her. "Congratulate me, Mrs.
I had asked Sam Ellersly to dine with me; so preoccupied was I that not until ten minutes before the hour set did he come into my mind he or any of his family, even his sister. My first impulse was to send word that I couldn't keep the engagement. "But I must dine somewhere," I reflected, "and there's no reason why I shouldn't dine with him, since I've done everything that can be done."
That was the only way to free his crowd from suspicion of intending to rig the market." "All right," said I. "Have you seen the afternoon paper?" he asked. As he held it out to me, my eye caught big Textile head-lines, then flashed to some others something about my going to marry Miss Ellersly. "All right," said I, and with the paper in my hand, went to my outside office.
"Can it be," I fretted aloud, "that Joe's racing round looking for an Episcopalian preacher, when there was a Methodist at hand?" "I'm sure he wouldn't bring anything but a Church of England priest," Mrs. Ball assured me loftily. "Why, Miss Ellersly wouldn't think she was married, if she hadn't a priest of her own church." My temper got the bit in its teeth.
Then I noticed that he was an Englishman, and I all but chuckled with delight. However, I said, "No offense intended," and clapped him on the shoulder with a friendly smile. "He's a good fellow, my man Monson, and knows a lot about horses." Miss Ellersly bit her lip and colored, but I noticed also that her eyes were dancing.
It is possible that, if I had thought of such a devilish device, I might have tried it is not all fair in love? But there was no need for my cudgeling my brains to carry that particular fortification on my way to what I had fixed my will upon. Bromwell Ellersly came to me of his own accord. I suppose the Ellerslys must have talked me over in the family circle.
Langdon, safe from danger of making "breaks," so I hoped, for the rest of the evening. But within a very few minutes I realized that my little misadventure had unnerved me. My hands were trembling so that I could scarcely lift the soup spoon to my lips, and my throat had got so far beyond control that I had difficulty in swallowing. Miss Ellersly and Mrs.
"You keep out of the way, now that you've become famous," he began, with a halting but heroic attempt at his customary easy superiority. "Are you living up in Connecticut, too? Sam Ellersly tells me your wife is stopping there with old Howard Forrester. Sam wants me to use my good offices in making it up between you two and her family."
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