The Little Red Chimney Part 4

"I should never have guessed it," Margaret Elizabeth repeated, after a minute spent in a quick review of that talk in the summer house.

"It is not always possible, surely, to gauge a person's bank account in the course of one conversation," her aunt suggested.

"I don't mean that; but don't you think, Aunt Eleanor, you can usually tell very rich people? They are apt to be limited, in a way. Not always, of course, but often. I can't explain it exactly. Perhaps it is over-refined."

"If to be refined is to be limited, I prefer to be limited," Mrs.

Pennington remarked.

It was plain that unless Margaret Elizabeth went to the length of retailing the whole of that Sunday morning conversation, which was out of the question, she could not hope to make her meaning clear.

"What surprises me," her aunt went on, "is that you should have met Augustus in a public park. It is very unlike him. I wonder what he thought of you?"

This brought out Miss Bentley's dimples, as she owned he had seemed not displeased to meet her. "I explained that I was waiting for Dr. Prue, who had gone in to see one of the superintendent's children." She further a.s.sured her aunt that River Bend Park was a delightful place in which to enjoy nature, on Sunday morning or any other time.

"I confess I do not choose a public park when I wish to enjoy nature--except for driving, of course. Perhaps," added Mrs. Pennington, "that is what you call over-refined."

Margaret Elizabeth considered this thoughtfully. "Perhaps it is," she said. "Not being able to enjoy things that are free to everybody."

But Margaret Elizabeth in that frivolously-becoming cap was an antidote to her own remarks. Mrs. Pennington smiled indulgently. Richard's daughter came honestly by some eccentricities, not to mention those Vandegrifts, whose influence she greatly deplored.

"You will outgrow these socialistic ideas, my dear," she said. "But I am still puzzled, the more I think of it, at your meeting Augustus on Sunday morning. Was it two weeks ago? I am under the impression he left for New York that very day."

"He didn't mention it, but there are afternoon trains," answered Margaret Elizabeth. "He merely said something about a sick boy he was going to see at St. Mary's."

This again was very unlike Augustus, but Mrs. Pennington said no more.

Meanwhile the faintest shadow of a doubt was dawning in her niece's mind; so shadowy she was scarcely aware of it, until, glowing from her walk across the park, she entered the drawing-room that afternoon.

There is, by the way, a difference between walking in Sunset Park, the abode of the elect, with a huge St. Bernard in leash, and taking the same exercise at River Bend, unchaperoned save by a chance guard. Any right-minded person must see this.

A young man, who sat talking to Mrs. Gerrard Pennington before the fire, rose at her entrance.

"I am glad you have come, Margaret Elizabeth," her aunt exclaimed.

"I think you know Mr. McAllister? But we have rather a good joke on you, for August says he was never in his life in River Bend Park."

"How do you do, Miss Bentley. Awfully glad to see you. That is, except to motor through, don't you know, Mrs. Pennington."

Miss Bentley's brown eyes met Mr. McAllister's blue ones, and in the period of one brief glance she experienced almost as many sensations, and reviewed as much past history, as the proverbial drowning man.

The casual resemblance was striking. But the eyes--these were not the friendly, merry eyes to which she had confided the fairy G.o.dmother nonsense. Fancy so much as mentioning fairy G.o.dmothers in the presence of these steely orbs.

Margaret Elizabeth was game, however.

"I was mistaken, of course," she owned lightly, as she shook hands.

"I have met so many people, and am stupid at connecting names and faces.

I recall Mr. McAllister perfectly." And straightway she plunged into New York and what was going on there. Had he seen "Grumpy" and wasn't it dear? And so on, and so on. Margaret Elizabeth could talk, and more than this she could look bewitching, and did, when she slipped out of her long coat, and with many graceful upward motions, removed her hat and fluffed her hair.

She would make tea, she loved to, in fact she seemed bent upon luring Augustus away from the fire and Mrs. Pennington. This young gentleman, whose mental processes were not rapid, and who habitually overworked any idea that found lodgment in his mind, was disposed to dwell upon River Bend Park and Miss Bentley's strange mistake in thinking she had seen him there, when actually, don't you know, he was on his way to New York.

It was just as well not to have the situation complicated by the presence of her more alert relative, whose amused glances kept the glow on Margaret Elizabeth's cheek at a most becoming pitch. Perhaps, too, the subconscious thinking concerning that same queer mistake, which went on while she chatted so gaily, so skilfully leading the way to safer ground, had something to do with it.

Augustus, unaware that he was led, was as clay in her hands. He warmed to her expressions of pleasure in the proposed dinner dance, which were indeed entirely genuine. A dance was a dance, and Miss Bentley was young. As she poured tea her curling lashes rested now on her cheek, were now lifted in smiling glances at the complacent Augustus, much as when on a certain Sunday morning, while softly laying bloom against bloom, her eyes had now and again met the eyes of the Candy Man. There were other callers, other tea drinkers, but to none did Mr. McAllister surrender his place of vantage.

"If she keeps on like this, Augustus is hers--if she wants him,"

Mr. Gerrard Pennington remarked to his wife later in the evening.

"If I could have her all to myself," Mrs. Pennington sighed; "but any impression I may make is neutralised by her a.s.sociation with those Vandegrifts. It is an absurd arrangement, spending half her time down there."

"I think you are rather in the lead, aren't you, my dear?"

Mrs. Pennington shrugged her shoulders, but there was some triumph in her smile. "She is a dear child, in spite of some absurd notions, and I long to see her well and safely settled. I don't quite know in what her charm most lies, but she has it."

"Oh, it's her youth, and the conviction that it is all so jolly well worth while. She is so keen about everything." There was an odd twinkle in Mr. Pennington's eyes, usually so piercing beneath their bushy grey brows. Margaret Elizabeth called him Uncle Gerry. It was amusing. He liked it, and enjoyed playing the part of Uncle Gerry. "Of course she's bound to get over that. Still, I shouldn't be in any haste to settle her."

His wife thought of her brother, the Professor of Archaeology, now in the Far East. "It is queer, but d.i.c.k never has," she said, answering the first part of his sentence. But when she spoke again, it was to say energetically: "The Towers needs a mistress, and August is irreproachable. Really, I am devoted to the boy."

Mr. Pennington found this amusing.

"If only it were a colonial house. It is handsome, but I prefer simpler lines," Mrs. Pennington continued meditatively.

The Towers was a combination of feudal castle and Swiss chalet erected thirty years before by the parents of Augustus, and occupying a commanding position on Sunset Ridge. The irreverent sometimes referred to it as the Salt Shakers.

Margaret Elizabeth meanwhile, in the solitude of her own room, was asking herself questions, for which she found no answers.

"Who--oh, who was this person with the nice friendly eyes that led one on to talk about fairy G.o.dmothers?"

She considered it in profound seriousness for a time, then suddenly broke into unrestrained laughter.

CHAPTER SIX

_In which Margaret Elizabeth is discussed at the Breakfast Table; in which also, later on, she and Virginia and Uncle Bob talk before the fire, and in which finally Margaret Elizabeth seeks consolation by relating to Uncle Bob her adventure in the park._

"No, she is not regularly beautiful," remarked Dr. Prue in her diagnostician manner as she poured her father's second cup of coffee, "but there is much that is captivating about her. Her hair grows prettily on her forehead, the firmness of her chin, the line of her lips in repose----"

"Mercy on us! You talk like a novel," interrupted Uncle Bob, who was longing to get in an oar. "Now I like her best when she laughs."

"But I was speaking of her face in repose."

"And any way," persisted Uncle Bob, "if she isn't a beauty, I don't know what you call it. She has the witchingest ways!"

"We were speaking of features, not ways. If you dissect her----"

"Good Heavens, Prue! Find another word."

"If you dissect her," the doctor repeated firmly, "you will find nothing remarkable in her separate features."

"But I insist," Uncle Bob spoke in a loud tone, and brought his fist down so emphatically his coffee spilled over into the saucer, "that beauty is a complex thing consisting of ways as well as features."