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Updated: May 20, 2025
The introduction completed, they stood looking at him, giggling and giggling. But Mark now came forward with outstretched hand, saying quietly: "I am glad to know you, sir." "Let us go in to dinner, children," said Mr. Kettering. They dined in the back room on the same floor, for the ground floor and the basement were devoted to the trade.
She came down the steps and stood between them; she looked at Kettering. "I thought you had gone," she said, surprised. "No; I Miss Leighton and I have been discussing the higher ethics," he said dryly. He held his hand to Gladys. "Well, good-bye," he said; there was a little emphasis on the last word. She just touched his fingers. "Good-bye."
Gladys did not know what to do; she was hoping and praying in her heart that Kettering would do as she had asked him, and stay away. What was the good of him coming again? What was the good of him making himself indispensable to Christine? The day passed wretchedly.
Her little face was very sad; she was looking at the big rocking-horse, and there were tears in her eyes. She and Jimmy had so often ridden its impossible back together; this deserted room was full of Jimmy and her mother to her sad heart it was peopled with ghost faces, and whispering voices that would never come any more. Kettering turned away. "Shall we see the rest of the house?" he asked.
In a defensive, innocent way she had deliberately encouraged Kettering. She liked him, and he helped her to forget; it restored her self-esteem to read the admiration in his kind eyes, it helped to soothe the hurt she had suffered from Jimmy's hands; and yet, in spite of it all, he was not Jimmy, and nobody could ever take Jimmy's place.
A man had risen from the sofa by the window; a tall young man, with a pale face and worried-looking eyes Jimmy Challoner! Jimmy only glanced at Christine; his eyes went past her almost immediately to the man who was following her into the room; a streak of red crept into his pale face. It was Kettering who recovered himself first; he went forward with outstretched hand. "Well, I never!
Kettering kept pressing him to eat more and more, and apparently found it hard to understand that his refusals were final. "Are you sure?" she asked him each time; and once she plucked up courage to assure him he must not stand on ceremony with them, and that he need not hesitate to eat his fill.
Kettering, before he left, said he would make it his business to give the girls to understand that they must treat him with respect, but begged him to ignore them in case they should misbehave, winding up with his oft-expressed conviction that all women-folk were crazy, and it was a mistake to take them seriously.
Kettering dropped his voice and looked reverential as he mentioned "all that money," it was quite clear Cleo's imagination had magnified the loss to accord with her sense of the fitness of things. A great loss of money was the next glorious thing to a great success. Mr. Kettering proceeded to lay it down as a general maxim that there was nothing in life like drawing a regular salary.
Kettering, too, no longer enumerated the contents of the larder in the hope of tempting him with some delicacy that was not on the table.
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