"MY DEAR MRS. WADE: It was INDEED a delight to us to see your neat
little handwriting again. NOTHING would give us greater pleasure,
I'm sure, than to take charge of your friend, who, I'm confident,
we shall find a most charming companion. Bernard will be with us,
so she won't feel it dull, I trust. We hope to have a very delightful
trip, and your happy thought in providing us with a travelling
companion will add, no doubt, to all our enjoyment--especially
Bernard's. We both join in very kindest regards to Mr. Wade and
yourself, and I am ever
"Yours most cordially,
"LUCY B. HANCOCK."
My wife fastened down the envelope with a very crushing air. "There!
THAT ought to do for her," she said, glancing up at me triumphantly.
"I should think she could see from that, if she's not as blind as
an owl, I've observed her atrocious designs upon Bernard, and mean
to checkmate them. If, after such a letter, she has the cheek to
send us her Yankee girl to chaperon, I shall consider her lost
to all sense of shame and all notions of decency. But she won't,
of course. She'll withdraw her unobtrusively." And Lucy flung the
peccant sheet that had roused all this wrath on to the back of the
fireplace with offended dignity.
She was wrong, however. By next evening's post a second letter
arrived, more discomposing, if possible, to her nerves than the
first one.
"Mrs. Lucy B. Hancock, London.
"DEAR MADAM: I learn from my friend, Mrs. Wade, of Oxford College,
that you are going to be kind enough to take charge of me across
the ocean. I thank you for your courtesy, and will gladly accept
your friendly offer. If you will let me know by what steamer you
start, I will register my passage right away in Liverpool. Also,
if you will be good enough to tell me from what depot you leave
London, and by what train, I will go along with you in the cars.
I'm unused to travel alone. "Respectfully, "MELISSA P. EASTERBROOK."
Lucy gazed at it in despair. "A creature like that!" she cried, all
horror-struck. "Oh, my poor, dear Bernard! 'The ocean,' she says!
'Go along with you in the cars!' 'Melissa P. Easterbrook!'"
"Perhaps," I said, tentatively, "she may be better than her name.
And at any rate, Bernard's not BOUND to marry her!"
Lucy darted at me profound volumes of mute feminine contempt. "The
girl's pretty," she said, at last, after a long, deep pause, during
which I had been made to realise to the full my own utter moral
and intellectual nothingness. "You may be sure she's pretty. Mrs.
Wade wouldn't have foisted her upon us if she wasn't pretty, but
unspeakable. It's a vile plot on her part to destroy my peace of
mind. You won't believe it, Vernon; but I KNOW that woman. And what
does the girl mean by signing herself 'Respectfully,' I wonder?"
"It's the American way," I ventured gently to interpose.
"So I gather," my wife answered, with a profound accent of contempt.
To her anything that isn't done in the purest English way stands
ipso facto self-condemned immediately.
A day or two later a second letter arrived from Miss Easterbrook,
in reply to one of Lucy's suggesting a rendezvous. I confess it
drew up in my mind a somewhat painful picture. I began to believe
my wife's fears were in some ways well grounded.
"Mrs. Lucy B. Hancock, London [as before].
"DEAR MADAM: I thank you for yours, and will meet you on the day
and hour you mention at St. Pancras depot. You will know me when
you see me, because I shall wear a dove-coloured dress, with bonnet
to match, and a pair of gray spectacles.
"Respectfully,
"MELISSA P. EASTERBROOK."
I laid it down and sighed. "A New England schoolmarm!" I exclaimed,
with a groan. "It sounds rather terrible. A dove-coloured dress and
a pair of gray spectacles! I fancy I can picture her to myself:
a tall and bony person of a certain age, with corkscrew curls, who
reads improving books and has views of her own about the fulfilment
of prophecy."
But as my spirits went down so Lucy's went up, like the old man
and woman in the cottage weather-glass. "That looks more promising,"
she said. "The spectacles are good. Perhaps, after all, dear
Bernard may escape. I don't think he's at all the sort of person
to be taken with a dove-coloured bonnet."
For some days after Bernard came home from Cambridge we chaffed a
good deal among ourselves about Miss Melissa Easterbrook. Bernard
took quite my view about the spectacles and dress. He even drew
on an envelope a fancy portrait of Miss Easterbrook, as he said
himself, "from documentary evidence." It represented a typical
schoolmarm of the most virulent order, and was calculated to
strike terror into the receptive mind of ingenuous youth on simple
inspection.
At last the day came when we were to go to Liverpool. We arrived
at St. Pancras in very good time, and looked about on the platform
for a tall and hard-faced person of transatlantic aspect, arrayed
in a dove-coloured dress and a pair of gray spectacles. But we
looked in vain; nobody about seemed to answer to the description.
At last Bernard turned to my wife with a curious smile. "I think
I've spotted her, mother," he said, waving his hand vaguely to the
right. "That lady over yonder--by the door of the refreshment-room.
Don't you see? That must be Melissa." For we knew her only as
Melissa already among ourselves; it had been raised to the mild
rank of a family witticism.
I looked in the direction he suggested, and paused for certainty.
There, irresolute by the door, and gazing about her timidly with
inquiring eyes, stood the prettiest, tiniest, most shrinking little
Western girl you ever saw in your life--attired, as she said, in
a dove-coloured dress, with bonnet to match, and a pair of gray
spectacles. But oh, what a dove-coloured dress! Walter Crane
might have designed it--one of those perfect travelling costumes
of which the America girl seems to possess a monopoly; and the
spectacles--well, the spectacles, though undoubtedly real, added
just a touch of piquancy to an otherwise almost painfully timid
and retiring little figure.
The moment I set eyes on Melissa Easterbrook, I will candidly
admit, I was her captive at once; and even Lucy, as she looked at
her, relaxed her face involuntarily into a sympathetic smile. As a
rule, Lucy might pose as a perfect model of the British matron in
her ampler and maturer years--"calmly terrible," as an American
observer once described the genus; but at sight of Melissa she
melted without a struggle. "Poor wee little thing, how pretty she
is!" she exclaimed, with a start. You will readily admit that was
a great deal from Lucy.
Melissa came forward tentatively, a dainty blush half rising on her
rather pale and delicate little cheek. "Mrs. Hancock?" she said, in
an inquiring tone, with just the faintest suspicion of an American
accent in her musical, small voice. Lucy took her hand cordially.
"I was sure it was you, ma'am," Melissa went on, with pretty confidence,
looking up into her face, "because Mrs. Wade told me you'd be as
kind to me as a mother; and the moment I saw you I just said to
myself, 'That MUST be Mrs. Hancock; she's so sweetly motherly.'
How good of you to burden yourself with a stranger like me! I hope,
indeed, I won't be too much trouble."
That was the beginning. I may as well say, first as last, we were
all of us taken by storm "right away" by Melissa. Lucy herself
struck her flag unconditionally before a single shot was fired; and
Bernard and I, hard hit at all points, surrendered at discretion.
She was the most charming little girl the human mind can conceive.
Our cold English language fails, in its roughness, to describe her.
She was petite, mignonne, graceful, fairy-like, yet with a touch
of Yankee quaintness and a delicious espieglerie that made her
absolutely unique in my experience of women. We had utterly lost
our hearts to her before ever we reached Liverpool; and, strange to
say, I believe the one of us whose heart was most completely gone
was, if only you'll believe it, that calmly terrible Lucy.
Melissa's most winning characteristic, however, as it seemed to me,
was her perfect frankness. As we whirled along on our way across
England, she told us everything about herself, her family, her friends,
her neighbours, and the population of Kansas City in general. Not
obtrusively or egotistically,--of egotism Melissa would be wholly
incapable,--but in a certain timid, confiding, half-childlike way,
as of the lost little girl, that was absolutely captivating. "Oh
no, ma'am," she said, in answer to one of Lucy's earliest questions;
"I didn't come over alone. I think I'd be afraid to. I came with a
whole squad of us who were doing Europe. A prominent lady in Kansas
City took charge of the square lot. And I got as far as Rome with
them, through Germany and Switzerland, and then my money wouldn't
run to it any further; so I had to go back. Travelling comes high
in Europe, what with hotels and fees and having to pay to get your
baggage checked. And that's how I came to want an escort."
Bernard smiled good-naturedly. "Then you had only a fixed sum," he
asked, "to make your European tour with?"
"That's so, sir," Melissa answered, looking up at him quizzically
through those pretty gray spectacles. "I'd put away quite a little
sum of my own to make this trip upon. It was my only chance of
seeing Europe and improving myself a piece. I knew when I started
I couldn't go all the round trip with the rest of my party; but I
thought I'd set out with them, anyway, and go ahead as long as my
funds held out; and then, when I was through, I'd turn about and
come home again."
"But you put away the money yourself?" Lucy asked, with a little
start of admiring surprise.
"Yes, ma'am," Melissa answered, sagely. "I know it. I saved it."
"From your allowance?" Lucy suggested, from the restricted horizon
of her English point of view.
Melissa laughed a merry little laugh of amusement. "Oh no," she
said; "from my salary."
"From your salary!" Bernard put in, looking down at her with an
inquiring glance.
"Yes, sir; that's it," Melissa answered, all unabashed. "You see,
for four years I was a clerk in the post-office." She pronounced
it "churk," but that's a detail.
"Oh, indeed!" Bernard echoed. He was burning to know how, I could
see, but politeness forbade him to press Melissa on so delicate
a point any further.
Melissa, however, herself supplied at once the missing information.
"My father was postmaster in our city," she said, simply, "under
the last administration,--President Blanco's, you know,--and he
made me one of his clerks, of course, when he'd gotten the place;
and as long as the fun went on, I saved all my salary for a tour
in Europe."
"And at the end of four years?" Lucy said.
"Our party went out," Melissa put in, confidentially. "So, when
the trouble began, my father was dismissed, and I had just enough
left to take me as far as Rome, as I told you."
I was obliged to explain parenthetically, to allay Lucy's wonderment,
that in America the whole personnel of every local government office
changes almost completely with each incoming President.
"That's so, sir," Melissa assented, with a wise little nod. "And
as I didn't think it likely our folks would get in again in a
hurry,--the country's had enough of us,--I just thought I'd make
the best of my money when I'd got it."
"And you used it all up in giving yourself a holiday in Europe?"
Lucy exclaimed, half reproachfully. To her economic British mind
such an expenditure of capital seemed horribly wasteful.
"Yes, ma'am," Melissa answered, all unconscious of the faint
disapproval implied in Lucy's tone. "You see, I'd never been
anywhere much away from Kansas City before; and I thought this was
a special opportunity to go abroad and visit the picture-galleries
and cathedrals of Europe, and enlarge my mind and get a little
culture. To us a glimpse of Europe's an intellectual necessary."
"Oh, then you regarded your visit as largely educational?" Bernard
put in, with increasing interest. Though he's a fellow and tutor
of King's, I will readily admit that Bernard's personal tastes lie
rather in the direction of rowing and foot-ball than of general
culture; but still, the American girl's point of view decidedly
attracted him by its novelty in a woman.
"That's so, sir," Melissa answered once more, in her accustomed
affirmative. "I took it as a sort of university trip. I graduated
in Europe. In America, of course, wherever you go, all you can see's
everywhere just the same--purely new and American; the language,
the manners, the type, don't vary. In Europe, you cross a frontier
or a ribbon of sea, and everything's different. Now, on this trip
of ours, we went first to Chester to glimpse a typical old English
town--those rows, oh, how lovely! And then to Leamington for
Warwick Castle and Kenilworth. Kenilworth's just glorious--isn't
it?--with its mouldering red walls and its dark-green ivy, and
the ghost of Amy Robsart walking up and down upon the close-shaven
English grass-plots."
"I've heard it's very beautiful," Bernard admitted, gravely.
"What! you live so close, and you've never BEEN there!" Melissa
exclaimed, in frank surprise.
Bernard allowed with a smile he had been so culpably negligent.
"And Stratford-on-Avon, too!" Melissa went on, enthusiastically,
her black eyes beaming. "Isn't Stratford just charming! I don't
care for the interminable Shakespeare nuisance, you know; that's
all too new and made up; we could raise a Shakespeare house like
that in Kansas City any day. But the church and the elms and the
swans and the river! I made such a sweet little sketch of them all,
so soft and peaceful. At least, the place itself was as sweet as
a corner of heaven, and I tried as well as I could in my way to
sketch it."
"I suppose it IS very pretty," Bernard replied, in a meditative
tone.
Melissa started visibly. "What! have you never been there, either?"
she exclaimed, taken aback. "Well, that IS odd, now! You live in
England, and have never run over to Stratford-on-Avon! Why, you
do surprise me! But there! I suppose you English live in the midst
of culture, as it were, and can get to it all right away at any
time; so perhaps you don't think quite as much of it as we, who
have to save up our money, perhaps for years, to get, for once in
our lives, just a single passing glimpse of it. You live at Cambridge,
you see; you must be steeped in culture right down to the finger-ends."
Bernard modestly responded, twirling his manly moustache, that the
river and the running-ground, he feared, were more in his way than
art or architecture.
"And where else did you go besides England?" Lucy asked, really
interested.
"Well, ma'am, from London we went across by Ostend to Bruges, where
I studied the Memlings, and made a few little copies from them,"
Melissa answered, with her sunny smile. "It's such a quaint old
place--Bruges; life seems to flow as stagnant as its own canals.
Have you ever been there?"
"Oh, charming!" Lucy answered; "most delightful and quiet.
But--er--who are the Memlings? I don't quite recollect them."
Melissa gazed at her open-eyed. "The Memlings?" she said, slowly;
"why, you've just missed the best thing at Bruges if you haven't
seen them. They've such a naive charm of their own, so innocent
and sympathetic. They're in the Hopital de St. Jean, you know, where
Memling put them. And it's so delightful to see great pictures
like those (though they're tiny little things to look at) in their
native surroundings, exactly as they were first painted--the 'Chasse
de Ste. Ursule,' and all those other lovely things, so infantile
in their simplicity, and yet so exquisitely graceful and pure and
beautiful. I don't know as I saw anything in Europe to equal them
for pathos in their own way--except, of course, the Fra Angelicos
at San Marco in Florence."
"I don't think I've seen them," Lucy murmured, with an uncomfortable
air. I could see it was just dawning upon her, in spite of her
patronising, that this Yankee girl, with her imperfect command of
the English tongue, knew a vast deal more about some things worth
notice than she herself did. "And where did you go then, dear?"
"Oh, from Bruges we went on to Ghent," Melissa answered, leaning
back, and looking as pretty as a picture herself in her sweet little
travelling dress, "to see the great Van Eyck, the 'Adoration of
the Lamb,' you know--that magnificent panel picture. And then
we went to Brussels, where we had Dierick Bouts and all the later
Flemings; and to Antwerp for Rubens and Vandyck and Quentin
Matsys; and the Hague, after that, for Rembrandt and Paul Potter;
and Amsterdam, in the end, for Van der Heist and Gerard Dow and the
late Dutch painters. So, you see, we had quite an artistic tour;
we followed up the development of Netherlandish art from beginning
to end in historical order. It was just delightful."
"I went to Antwerp once," Bernard put in, somewhat sheepishly, still
twirling his moustache; "but it was on my way to Switzerland, and
I didn't see much, as far as I can recollect, except the cathedral
and the quay and the hotel I was stopping at."
"Ah, that's all very well for YOU," Melissa answered, with a
rather envious air. "You can see these things any day. But for us
the chance comes only once in a lifetime, and we must make the most
of it."
Well, in such converse as this we reached Liverpool in due time,
and went next morning on board our steamer. We had a lovely passage
out, and, all the way, the more we saw of Melissa the more we liked
her. To be sure, Lucy received a terrible shock the third day out,
when she asked Melissa what she meant to do when she returned to
Kansas City. "You won't go into the post-office again, I suppose,
dear?" she said, kindly, for we had got by that time on most friendly
terms with our little Melissa.
"I guess not," Melissa answered. "No such luck any more. I'll have
to go back again to the store as usual."
"The store!" Lucy repeated, bewildered. "I--I don't quite understand
you."
"Well, the shop, I presume you'd call it," Melissa answered, smiling.
"My father's gotten a book-store in Kansas City, and before I went
into the post-office I helped him at the counter; in fact, I was
his saleswoman."
"I assure you, Vernon," Lucy remarked, in our berth that night,
"if an Englishwoman had said it to me, I'd have been obliged to
apologise to her for having forced her to confess it, and I don't
know what way I should ever have looked to hide my face while she was
talking about it. But with Melissa it's all so different somehow.
She spoke as if it was the most natural thing on earth for her
father to keep a shop, and she didn't seem the least little bit in
the world ashamed of it, either."
"Why should she?" I answered, with my masculine bluntness. But that
was perhaps a trifle too advanced for Lucy. Melissa was exercising
a widening influence on my wife's point of view with astonishing
rapidity; but still, a perfect lady must always draw a line somewhere.
All the way across, indeed, Melissa's lively talk was a constant
delight and pleasure to every one of us. She was so taking,--that
girl,--so confidential, so friendly. We really loved her. Then
her quaint little Americanisms were as pretty as herself--not only
her "Yes, sirs," and her "No, ma'ams," her "I guess" and "That's
so," but her fresh Western ideas, and her infinite play of fancy
in the queen's English. She turned it as a potter turns his clay.
In Britain our mother tongue has crystallised long since into set
forms and phrases. In America it has the plasticity of youth; it is
fertile in novelty--nay, even in surprises. And Melissa knew how to
twist it deftly into unexpected quips and incongruous conjunctions.
Her talk ran on like a limpid brook, with a musical ripple playing
ever on the surface. As for Bernard, he helped her about the ship
like a brother, as she moved lightly around, with her sylph-like
little form, among the ropes and capstans. Melissa liked to be
helped, she said; she didn't believe one bit in woman's rights;
no, indeed; she was a great deal too fond of being taken care of
for that. And who wouldn't take care of her,--that delicate little
thing,--like some choice small masterpiece of cunning workmanship?
Why, she almost looked as if she were made of Venetian glass, and
a fall on deck would shatter her into a thousand fragments.
And her talk all the way was of the joys of Europe--the castles
and abbeys she was leaving behind, the pictures and statues she had
seen and admired, the pictures and statues she had left unvisited.
"Somebody told me in Paris," she said to me one day, as she hung on
my arm on deck, and looked up into my face confidingly with that
childlike smile of hers, "the only happy time in an American woman's
life is the period when she's just got over the first poignant regret
at having left Europe, and hasn't just reached the point when she
makes up her mind that, come what will, she really MUST go back
again. And I thought, for my part, then my happiness was fairly
spoiled for life, for I shall never be able again to afford the
journey."
"Melissa, my child," I said, looking down at those ripe, rich lips,
"in this world one never knows what may turn up next. I've observed
on my way down the path of life that, when fruit hangs rosy red
on the tree by the wall, some passer-by or other is pretty sure in
the end to pluck it."
But that was too much for Melissa's American modesty. She looked
down and blushed like a rose herself; but she answered me nothing.
A night or two before we reached New York I was standing in the
gloom, half hidden by a boat on the davits amidships, enjoying my
vespertinal cigar in the cool of evening; and between the puffs I
caught from time to time stray snatches of a conversation going on
softly in the twilight between Bernard and Melissa. I had noticed
of late, indeed, that Bernard and Melissa walked much on deck in
the evening together; but this particular evening they walked long
and late, and their conversation seemed to me (if I might judge
by fragments) particularly confidential. The bits of it I caught
were mostly, it is true, on Melissa's part (when Bernard said
anything he said it lower). She was talking enthusiastically of
Venice, Florence, Pisa, Rome, with occasional flying excursions into
Switzerland and the Tyrol. Once, as she passed, I heard something
murmured low about Botticelli's "Primavera"; when next she went
by it was the Alps from Murren; a third time, again, it was the
mosaics at St. Mark's, and Titian's "Assumption," and the doge's
palace. What so innocent as art, in the moonlight, on the ocean?
At last Bernard paused just opposite where I stood (for they didn't
perceive me), and said very earnestly, "Look here, Melissa,"--he
had called her Melissa almost from the first moment, and she to
prefer it, it seemed so natural,--"look here, Melissa. Do you know,
when you talk about things like that, you make me feel so dreadfully
ashamed of myself."
"Why so, Mr. Hancock?" Melissa asked, innocently.
"Well, when I think what opportunities I've had, and how little I've
used them," Bernard exclaimed, with vehemence, "and then reflect
how few you've got, and how splendidly you've made the best of
them, I just blush, I tell you, Melissa, for my own laziness."
"Perhaps," Melissa interposed, with a grave little air, "if one
had always been brought up among it all, one wouldn't think quite
so much of it. It's the novelty of antiquity that makes it so charming
to people from my country. I suppose it seems quite natural, now,
to you that your parish church should be six hundred years old,
and have tombs in the chancel, with Elizabethan ruffs, or its floor
inlaid with Plantagenet brasses. To us, all that seems mysterious,
and in a certain sort of way one might almost say magical. Nobody
can love Europe quite so well, I'm sure, who has lived in it from
a child. YOU grew up to many things that burst fresh upon us at
last with all the intense delight of a new sensation."
They stood still as they spoke, and looked hard at one another.
There was a minute's pause. Then Bernard began again. "Melissa,"
he faltered out, in a rather tremulous voice, "are you sorry to go
home again?"
"I just hate it!" Melissa answered, with a vehement burst. Then
she added, after a second, "But I've enjoyed the voyage."
"You'd like to live in Europe?" Bernard asked.
"I should love it!" Melissa replied. "I'm fond of my folks,
of course, and I should be sorry to leave them; but I just love
Europe. I shall never go again, though. I shall come right away
back to Kansas City now, and keep store for father for the rest of
my natural existence."
"It seems hard," Bernard went on, musing, "that anybody like you,
Melissa, with such a natural love of art and of all beautiful
things,--anybody who can draw such sweet dreams of delight as those
heads you showed us after Filippo Lippi, anybody who can appreciate
Florence and Venice and Rome as you do,--should have to live all
her life in a far Western town, and meet with so little sympathy
as you're likely to find there."
"That's the rub," Melissa replied, looking up into his face with
such a confiding look. (If any pretty girl had looked up at ME
like that, I should have known what to do with her; but Bernard
was twenty-four, and young men are modest.) "That's the rub, Mr.
Hancock. I like--well, European society so very much better. Our
men are nice enough in their own way, don't you know; but they
somehow lack polish--at least, out West, I mean, in Kansas City.
Europeans may n't be very much better when you get right at them,
perhaps; but on the outside, anyway to ME, they're more attractive
somehow."
There was another long pause, during which I felt as guilty as
ever eavesdropper before me. Yet I was glued to the spot. I could
hardly escape. At last Bernard spoke again. "I should like to have
gone round with you on your tour, Melissa," he said. "I don't know
Italy; I don't suppose by myself I could even appreciate it. But
if YOU were by my side, you'd have taught me what it all meant;
and then I think I might perhaps understand it."
Melissa drew a deep breath. "I wish I could take it all over again,"
she answered, half sighing. "And I didn't see Naples, either. That
was a great disappointment. I should like to have seen Naples, I
must confess, so as to know I could at least in the end die happy."
"Why do you go back?" Bernard asked, suddenly, with a bounce,
looking down at that wee hand that trembled upon the taffrail.
"Because I can't help myself," Melissa answered, in a quivering
voice. "I should like--I should like to live always in England."
"Have you any special preference for any particular town?" Bernard
asked, moving closer to her--though, to be sure, he was very, very
near already.
"N--no; n--none in particular," Melissa stammered out, faintly,
half sidling away from him.
"Not Cambridge, for example?" Bernard asked, with a deep gulp and
an audible effort.
I felt it would be unpardonable for me to hear any more. I had heard
already many things not intended for me. I sneaked off, unperceived,
and left those two alone to complete that conversation.
Half an hour later--it was a calm, moonlight night--Bernard rushed
down eagerly into the saloon to find us. "Father and mother," he
said, with a burst, "I want you up on deck for just ten minutes.
There's something up there I should like so much to show you."
"Not whales?" I asked, hypocritically, suppressing a smile.
"No, not whales," he replied; "something much more interesting."
We followed him blindly, Lucy much in doubt what the thing might
be, and I much in wonder, after Mrs. Wade's letter, how Lucy might
take it.
At the top of the companion--ladder Melissa stood waiting for us,
demure, but subdued, with a still timider look than ever upon that
sweet, shrinking, small face of hers. Her heart beat hard, I could
see by the movement of her bodice, and her breath came and went;
but she stood there like a dove, in her dove-coloured travelling
dress.
"Mother," Bernard began, "Melissa's obliged to come back to America,
don't you know, without having ever seen Naples. It seems a horrid
shame she should miss seeing it. She hadn't money enough left, you
recollect, to take her there."
Lucy gazed at him, unsuspicious. "It does a pity," she answered,
sympathetically.
"She'd enjoy it so much. I'm sorry she hasn't been able to carry
out all her programme."
"And, mother," Bernard went on, his eyes fixed hard on hers, "how
awfully she'd be thrown away on Kansas City! I can't bear to think
of her going back to 'keep store' there."
"For my part, I think it positively wicked," Lucy answered, with a
smile, "and I can't think what--well, people in England are about,
to allow her to do it."
I opened my eyes wide. Did Lucy know what she was saying? Or had
Melissa, then, fascinated her--the arch little witch!--as she had
fascinated the rest of us?
But Bernard, emboldened by this excellent opening, took Melissa
by the hand as if in due form to present her. "Mother," he said,
tenderly, leading the wee thing forward, "and father, too, THIS is
what I wanted to show you--the girl I'm engaged to!"
I paused and trembled. I waited for the thunderbolt. But no thunderbolt
fell. On the contrary, Lucy stepped forward, and, under cover of
the mast, caught Melissa in her arms and kissed her twice over.
"My dear child," she cried, pressing her hard, "my dear little
daughter, I don't know which of you two I ought most to congratulate."
"But I do," Bernard murmured low. And, his father though I am, I
murmured to myself, "And so do I, also."
"Then you're not ashamed of me, mother dear," Melissa whispered,
burying her dainty little bead on Lucy's shoulder, "because I kept
store in Kansas City?"
Lucy rose above herself in the excitement of the moment. "My
darling wee daughter," she answered, kissing her tenderly again,
"it's Kansas City alone that ought to be ashamed of itself for
putting YOU to keep store--such a sweet little gem as you are!"