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With more manners than efficiency Flame and her Father dropped at once every helpful thing they were doing and sat down in rocking chairs to listen to the plan. "Flame, of course, can't stay here all alone. Flame's Mother turned and confided sotto voce to her husband. Young men might call.
"So if by any chance, Mr. Mr. Bertrand," interrupted the Master of the House a bit abruptly, "you happen to have the carving knife and fork still on your person ... I thought I saw a white string hanging " "I have!" said the Lay Reader with his first real grin. With great formality the Master of the House drew back a chair and bowed Flame's Mother to it.
She had been depressed by her ridiculous dinner and Lucretius had been most unpleasant. He was such a fool, too, in his idea of love. The brevity of the heated hours was the flame's best fuel. Venus the Plunderer seemed to smile, and there quickened within her the desire for excitement, for the exercise of power, for the obliterating ecstasies of a fresh amour.
"U m m m," sniffed Flame's Mother. With an impulse purely practical she started for the kitchen. "The season happens to be Christmas time," she suggested bluntly. "Now if you could see your way to make a sermon that smelt like doughnuts and plum-pudding " "Doughnuts?" queried her Husband and hurried after her.
"Is it remotely possible that after your promise to me, your sacred promise to me ?" The whole structure of the home, of mutual confidence, of all the Future itself, crackled and toppled in her voice. To the Lay Reader's face, and right through the Lay Reader's face, to the face of the Master of the House, Flame's glance went homing with an unaccountable impulse.
The Lay Reader is almost sure to call.... He's a dear delightful soul of course, but I'm afraid he has an amorous eye." "All Lay Readers have amorous eyes," reflected her husband. "Taken all in all it is a great asset." "Don't be flippant!" admonished Flame's Mother. "There are reasons ... why I prefer that Flame's first offer of marriage should not be from a Lay Reader." "Why?" brightened Flame.
"You're not of course a very old man.... But still you are pretty old, aren't you? You've seen a whole lot of Christmasses, I mean?" "Yes," conceded her Father. From the great clumsy rolling collar of her blanket wrapper Flame's little face loomed suddenly very pink and earnest. "But Father," urged Flame. "Did you ever in your whole life spend a Christmas just exactly the way you wanted to?
"And is related in some way," persisted Flame, "to Edward the 2nd Duke of York." "Of that guarantee of respectability I am, of course, not quite so sure," said her Father. With a temperish stamping of feet, an infuriate yank of the door-bell, Uncle Wally's chauffeur announced that the limit of his endurance had been reached. Blankly Flame's Mother stared at Flame's Father.
And the mousey smell of the old piano fairly jerked the dogs to its senile old ivory keyboard. Cocking their ears to its quavering treble notes, snorting their nostrils through its gritty guttural basses, they watched Flame's facile fingers sweep from sound to sound. "Oh, what a glorious lark!" quivered Flame. "What a a lonely glorious lark!"
Please summon her instantly!" Crossing genially to the table the Master of the House reached down and dragged out the Bull Dog by the brindled scuff of her neck. The scratch on her nose was still bleeding slightly. And one eye was closed. "This is Miss Flora!" he said. Indignantly Flame's Mother glanced at the dog, and then from her daughter's face to the face of the young man again.
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