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"After his carelessness in this matter, he seemed to want to get away from the house at once," observed Miss Van Rolsen, "without availing himself of the two-weeks' notice I had agreed to give him." The visitor relapsed into his chair; an ironical light appeared in his eyes. "Perhaps," added Miss Van Rolsen, "you attach no significance to the fact?"
The item, like an oasis in the desert of his general incapacity and uselessness, exercised an odd fascination for him in spite of the absolute impossibility of his professing to possess a fractional part of those moral attributes demanded by the fair advertiser. She a Miss Van Rolsen was seeking a paragon, not a person.
Miss Dalrymple raised her brows and moved to a piano to adjust the flowers in a vase; she smiled at them with soft enigmatic lips. "If I may venture an opinion, Madam," observed Mr. Heatherbloom in a far-away voice, "I should say Naughty will surely return, or be returned." "You venture an opinion!" said Miss Van Rolsen. "You!"
There was no record of her name at any ticket office; no state-room had been reserved by, or for her; in fact, telegrams to officials in Chicago and other points west failed to elicit satisfactory information of any kind. Miss Van Rolsen found herself with something real to worry about; she rose to the occasion; her niece, after all, was everything to her.
Here Miss Dalrymple indited rapidly a most voluminous message, paid the clerk in a businesslike manner, and, unmindful of his amazed expression as he read what she had written, tranquilly re-entered the carriage. "Miss Van Rolsen will be relieved when she gets that," observed Mr. Heatherbloom mechanically. "It'll be a happy moment for her," meditatively.
The influential friends of his father in the financial world had become impossible aids; he had to continue as he had planned, to go his own way, and his, alone. It would have been easy for him, as his father's son and the prospective nephew of the influential Miss Van Rolsen, to have obtained one of those large salaried positions, or "sinecures", with little to do.
And started back to do so when an excited face confronted her. "If ye plase, ma'am!" It was the cook. "What is it?" Miss Van Rolsen spoke sharply. "If ye plase, I think, ma'am, this Mr. Heatherbloom has taken lave av his senses." "Why, what has he been doing?" "He has, faith, just jumped over the fence into our neighbor's yard on the corner, and "
Miss Van Rolsen, to his consternation, seemed to unbend somewhat before him, as if she were beginning actually! to be more prepossessed in his favor. These evidences that he was rising in the stern lady's good graces filled Mr. Heatherbloom with new dismay; destiny certainly seemed to be making a mock of him.
Had the speaker looked around at this moment, he might have observed that the heavy curtains, drawn before the door leading into the hall and closed by Miss Van Rolsen, moved suddenly, but neither the agent nor Miss Van Rolsen, engrossed at the far end of the room, noticed. The drapery wavered a moment; then settled once more into its folds.
"But tell me why you have not been pleased with him, and, in brief, all the circumstances of his coming here." Miss Van Rolsen did so in a voice she strove to make patient although she could not disguise its tremulousness, or the feverish anxiety that consumed her. She related the most trivial details, seeming irrelevances, but the visitor did not interrupt her.
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