Quaint Courtships Part 19

Saunders blenched. He half turned to flee, but Janet's strong fingers closed on his sleeve; and as her lips moved to claim him before minister and meeting, he thought that he heard the Devil chuckling, a great way off.

IN THE INTERESTS OF CHRISTOPHER

BY MAY HARRIS

Mrs. Manstey's big country-house was temporarily empty of the guests she had gathered for a week-end in June when the two Eversley girls reached it, Sat.u.r.day at noon. Their hostess met them at the door when the carriage wheels crunched on the gravelled curve of the drive before the house--a charming gray-haired woman of sixty, with a youthful face and a delicate girlish color.

"I've sent everybody away to explore--to ravage the country," she gayly explained the emptiness of the large hall, where the grouped chairs seemed recently vacated and pleasantly suggestive of suspended tete-a-tete. "I've had Rose before," Mrs. Manstey pursued, taking them up the stairs to their rooms, "but not _you!_" She gave Edith's shoulder an affectionate little pat. She thought the younger girl extremely beautiful--which she was, with a vivid, piquant face and charming eyes.

"I've had my day," Rose Eversley acknowledged, with her usual air of jesting gravity, that, almost ironic, made one always a little unsure of her. "Dear Mrs. Manstey, you perfectly see--don't you?--that Edith is papa's image, and--"

"And he was my old sweetheart!" Mrs. Manstey completed, with humorous appreciation of her own repet.i.tion of an old story.

"Was he, really?" Edith wondered. "Mamma says you were _her_ friend."

Mrs. Manstey laughed. "Couldn't I have been--both?" she gayly put it.

"Friends are better than sweethearts--they last longer. Though of course you won't agree, at your age, to such heresy."

"Sweethearts?" the girl pondered as she lifted her hands to take off her hat. "I--don't know. It's such a pretty word, but it doesn't mean much these days--there aren't any!" She shrugged her shoulders with a petulant pessimism her youth made amusing. "Papa was the last of the kind--he's a _love!_--and you let mamma have him!"

"I didn't 'let.'" Mrs. Manstey enjoyed it. "When he met your mother he forgot all about me. Think of it! I haven't seen either him or your mother in years, years, years!"

"_My_ years!" Edith said. "I was a baby, mamma says, when she saw you last."

"So you were."

A servant knocked, with a note for Mrs. Manstey. As she took it and turned to leave the room, her smile, caressingly including Rose, went past her and lingered a thought longer--as people's smiles had a way of doing--with Edith.

"I know you're tired," she added to her smile. "Five hours of train--Get into something cool and rest. Luncheon isn't until two."

She disappeared, and Rose looked at her sister, who, with her hat in her hand, was going into her room.

"Well--?" Rose lifted her voice in its faint drawl of interrogation.

Edith looked at her absently. "I don't know," she said, drawing her straight brows into a puzzled frown. "I'm as far away as ever--I'm so perplexed."

"Well--you'll _have_ to decide, you know."

Edith shook her head impatiently and went into her room, closing the door. She hurried out of her dusty travelling things into cool freshness, and, settled in the most comfortable chair, gave herself up to an apparently endless fit of musing. She was so physically content that her mind refused to respond with any vigorous effort; to think at all was a crumpled rose-leaf.

From the lower hall the clock chimed one with musical vibrations. Edith leaned forward with her chin on her hand, driving her thoughts into a definite path. The curtains stirred in a breeze from the out-of-doors whose domain swept with country greenness and advent.i.tious care away from the window under the high brilliance of the sun.

Close to the window a writing-table, with blotter, pens, and ink, made a focal-point for her gaze. At first a mere detail in her line of vision, it attained by degrees, it seemed, a definite relevancy to her train of thought. She looked in her portmanteau for her desk, and getting out some note-paper, went to the table and began to write a letter.

What she had to say seemed difficult to decide. She wrote a line, stared out of the window with fixity, and then wrote again--a flurry of quick, decisive strokes as if at determinate pressure. But a sigh struck across her mood, and almost against her will the puzzled crinkle returned to her brow. The curtain blew against her face, disarranging her hair, and as she lifted her hand to put back a straggling lock, the wind tossed the sheet of the letter she was writing out of the window. Her eyes, as she sprang up, followed its flight, but it whirled around the corner of the house and was lost to her desperate gaze.

Neglige, even of the most-becoming description, was not to be thought of in pursuing the loss, for the silence of the house had stirred to the sound of gay voices, the movement of feet.

Rose, also in neglige, opened the door between them and found her madly tearing off her pale-blue kimono. "What's the matter?" She paused, staring.

"Heavens! My shoes--please!--there by the table." She kicked off her ridiculous blue slippers and pulled on the small colonials her sister in open wonder handed her. "If you had only been dressed," she almost wailed, "you might have been able to get it."

"Get what?"

"My letter!" Tragic, in spite of a mouthful of pins--which is a woman's undoubted preference, no matter how many befrilled pincus.h.i.+ons entreat a division of spoils,--she turned her face with its import of sudden things to her sister in explanation. "I was writing a letter and it blew out of the window!"

"Well, if it did--"

"But, don't you see?--I was writing to _Christopher!_ I had been thinking and thinking, and at last I screwed up my courage to answer his letter.

I had all but signed my name!"

Rose Eversley began to laugh helplessly; heartlessly, her sister thought.

"If you hadn't signed it--" she at last comforted her sister's indignant face that was reflected from the mirror, where she stood as she fastened the white stock at her throat and snapped the clasp of her belt.

"Signed it!" She was almost in tears. "What difference will that make when I claim the letter? I _must_ find it! But of course some one who knows me will be sure to find it. And _that_ letter, of all letters!"

"If I were you, Edith," Rose advised, calmly, "I shouldn't--"

"Well?"--with her hand on the door-k.n.o.b.

"--try to find it. It will be impossible to trace it to you, in that case."

"But _don't_ you see--"

"Wait!" Rose caught and pulled her back. "How _could_ they know? You'll get in much deeper. What had you written?"

"I said, 'Dear Christopher'--"

Rose laughed. "I'm glad you didn't say 'Dear Mr. Brander.' In that case you'd have given _him_ away. But 'Christopher' is such an unusual name, they might--Sherlock Holmes could trace him by it alone."

"You _are_ a Job's comforter--a perfect Eliphaz the Temanite! Oh, oh!"

Her soft crescendo was again tragic.

"In effect you said: 'Dear Christopher, as you have so often entreated, I have at last decided to be thine. The tinkle of thy shekels, now that I am so nearly shekelless myself, has done its fatal worst. I am thine--'"

"Oh, let me go!" Edith cried, in a fury close to tears. "You haven't any feeling. You are not going to sacrifice _your_self!"

"To a good-looking young man who loves me exceedingly, and to something over a million? No, I am not!" Rose said, dryly.

"Oh, it's dreadful! Perfectly!" Edith cried, and on her indecision Rose hung another bit of wisdom:

"Why don't you go down in a leisurely way and investigate? You know the direction it blew away; follow it. If you meet any one, be admiring the scenery!"