"Hallo there--Anthony Robeson--don't be in such a hurry you can't notice a
fellow."
The big figure rushing through the snow paused, wheeled, and thrust out a
hand of hearty greeting. "That you, Carey? Hat over your eyes like a train
robber--electric lights all behind you--and you expect me to smile at you
as I go by! How are you? How's Judith?"
"Infernally lonely--I mean I am--Judith's off on a visit to her mother.
Say, Tony--take me home with you--will you? I want some decent things to
eat, so I'm holding you up on purpose."
"Good--come on. Train goes in a few minutes. Juliet will be delighted."
The two hurried on together into the station from which the suburban
trains were constantly leaving. As they entered they encountered a mutual
friend, at whom both flung themselves enthusiastically with alternate
greetings:
"Roger Barnes----"
"Roger--old fellow--glad to see you back!"
"Patient safely landed?"
"Get a big fee?"
"Where you going?"
"Let's take him home with us, Tony----" The third man looked smiling at
Tony. "I'll challenge you to," said he.
"That's easy--come on," responded Anthony Robeson with cordiality. "I'll
just telephone Mrs. Robeson."
"That's it," said Dr. Roger Barnes. "You don't dare not to. I understand.
Go ahead. But if she's too much dashed let me know, will you?"
Anthony turned, laughing, into a telephone closet, from which he emerged
in time to catch his train with his guests.
"It's all right," he assured them. "But it's only fair to let her know a
few minutes ahead. You like to understand, Roger, before you start, don't
you, whether your emergency case is a hip-fracture or a cut lip, so you
can tell whether to take your glue or your sewing-silk?"
"By all means," said the bachelor of the party. "And I suppose you think
Mrs. Juliet Marcy Robeson is now smiling happily to herself over this
little surprise. I'll lay you anything you please that if I can make her
own up she'll admit that she said '_Merciful heavens!_' into the telephone
when she got your message."
Anthony shook his head. "Evidently you don't know what guests in the
remote suburbs on a stormy February night mean to a poor girl whose
nearest neighbour is five hundred feet away. Your ideas of married life
need a little freshening, too. They're pretty antique."
It was a half-mile from the station to the house--the "box of a
house"--which had been Anthony's home for five months, and toward which he
now led his friends with the air of a man about to show his most treasured
possessions. He strode through the deepening snow as if he enjoyed the
strenuous tramp, setting a pace which Wayne Carey, with his office life,
if not the doctor, more vigorously built and bred, found difficult to
maintain.
"Here we are," called the leader, pointing toward windows glowing with a
ruddy light. The doctor looked up with interest. Carey was a frequent
visitor, but the busy surgeon, old school-and-college chum of Anthony's
though he was, was about to have his first introduction to a place of
which he had heard much, but of whose nearness to Paradise he doubted with
the strong skepticism of a man who has seen many a fair beginning end in
all unhappiness and desolation.
As they stamped upon the little porch the door flew open, the brilliancy
and comfort of a fire-and-lamplit room leaped out at them, a delicious
faint odour of cookery assailed their hungry nostrils, and the welcome
which makes all worth having met them on the threshold.
"Wayne," said the rich young voice of the mistress of the house, "I'm so
glad. Roger Barnes, this is just downright good of you; it's so long
you've promised us this. Tony----"
What she said to Tony must have been whispered in his ear if voiced at
all, for the two guests, looking on with laughing, envious eyes, saw their
hostess swept unceremoniously into a bearlike embrace, swung into the air
as one thrusts up a child, poised there an instant, laughing and
protesting, then slowly lowered to be kissed, and set down once more
lightly upon the floor.
"It's all right. I didn't tumble your hair a bit," said Anthony coolly.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, but Wayne understands--and Roger will some day, I
hope--that a man who has been thinking about it all the way home can't put
it off on account of a couple of idiots who stand and stare instead of
politely turning their backs. Oh, don't mention it--it doesn't disturb me
at all; and Mrs. Robeson is becoming reconciled to my impetuosity by
degrees. Make yourselves at home, boys. Juliet----"
"Take them upstairs, Tony, please. Of course we can't let them go back
to-night, now we have them. It's beginning to storm heavily, isn't it? I
thought so. Take them to the guest-room, Tony--and dinner will be served
as soon as you are down."
* * * * *
"By Jupiter, I believe she means it," declared the doctor, with approval,
as the door of the bedroom closed on his host. "I think I can tell when a
woman is shamming. She's improved, hasn't she, tremendously? Pretty girl
always, but--well--bloomed now. Nice little house. Believe I'll have to
stay, though I ought not--just to take observations on Tony. His
enthusiasm has all the appearance of reality. In fact, it strikes me he
has rather----"
It was on his lips to say "rather more than you have," but it occurred to
him in time that jokes on this ground are dangerous. Wayne Carey had been
married in November, was living in a somewhat unpretentious way in a
downtown boarding-house, and certainly had to-night so much of a lost-dog
air that it made the doctor pause. So he substituted: "--rather more than
I should have expected, even of a fellow who has got the girl he has
wanted all his life," and fell to washing and brushing vigorously, eyeing
meanwhile the little room with a critical bachelor's appreciation of
beauty and comfort in the quarters he is to occupy. It was very simply
furnished, certainly, but it struck him as a place where his dreams were
likely to be pleasant for every reason in the world.
Downstairs, Juliet, in the dining-room, was surveying her table with the
hostess's satisfaction. Opposite her stood a tall and slender girl,
black-haired, black-eyed, with a face of great attractiveness.
"I wish, Mrs. Robeson," she was saying eagerly, "you would let me serve
you as your maid, and not make a guest of me. Really, I should love to do
it. I don't need to meet your friends, and I don't mind seeming what I
really am--your----"
"Rachel Redding," Juliet interrupted, lifting an affectionate glance
across the table, "if you want to seem what you really are--my friend--you
will let me do as I like."
"My shabby clothes----" murmured the girl.
"If I could look as much like a princess as you do in them----"
"Mrs. Robeson, in that lovely dull red you're a queen----"
"--dowager," finished Juliet gayly. "Well, I'll be proud of you, and you
can be proud of me, if you like, and together we'll make those hungry men
think there's nothing like us. The dinner's the thing. Isn't it the
luckiest chance in the world I sent for those oysters this morning? Doctor
Barnes is perfectly fine, but he never would believe in the happiness of
married life if the coffee were poor or the beefsteak too much broiled.
Doesn't the table look pretty? Those red geranium blossoms you brought me
give it just the gay touch it needed this winter night."
* * * * *
Three men, standing about the wide fireplace, warming cold hands at its
friendly blaze, turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in,
followed by a graceful girl in gray. Juliet presented her guests with the
air of conferring upon them a favour, and they seemed quite ready to
accept it as such.
Anthony looked on with interest to see a person whom he had known hitherto
only as a pretty but poor young neighbour whom Juliet had engaged to help
her for a certain part of every day, introduced as his wife's friend, and
greeted by Doctor Barnes and Wayne Carey with quite evident admiration and
pleasure. He looked hard at her, as Carey seated her, noticing for the
first time that she was really worth consideration, and remembering
vaguely that Juliet had more than once tried to impress him with the fact.
If it had not been for the other fellows, with whose eyes as their host he
was now stimulated to observe her, he might have been still some time
longer in coming to the realisation that Juliet had found somebody in whom
her genuine interest was not misplaced. But Anthony Robeson had all his
life been singularly blind to the fascinations of most other women than
Juliet. As he turned his keen gaze from Rachel Redding to the charming
figure that sat on the other side of the table the satisfaction in his
eyes became so pronounced that it could mean, Dr. Roger Barnes admitted to
himself, as he caught it, nothing less than a very real happiness.
It was not an elaborate dinner. It was not by any means the sort of dinner
Juliet might have prepared had she known that morning whom she was to
entertain. It was merely a dinner planned with affectionate care to please
and satisfy one hungry man who liked good things to eat--and amplified as
much as possible in quantity after Anthony's message reached her. And by
that admirable collusion between hostess and feminine friend which can
sometimes be effected when the situation demands it, the dinner prepared
for three seemed ample for five.
[Illustration: "Three men, standing about the wide fireplace ... turned
expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a
graceful girl in gray."]
Between them Juliet and Rachel Redding served the various dishes and
changed the plates which Anthony handed from his place. It was gracefully
done and so simply that the absence of a maid was a thing to be enjoyed
rather than regretted. When Juliet, in the softly sweeping dull-red frock
which made of her a warm picture for a winter's night, slipped from her
chair and moved about the room, or brought in from the kitchen a steaming
dish, she seemed the ideal hostess, herself bestowing what her own hands
had prepared. And when Rachel Redding offered a man a cup of fragrant
coffee, smiling down in the general direction of his uplifted face without
meeting his eyes, there was certainly nothing lost from his enjoyment of
the beverage.
"Say, but this dinner has tasted just about right," was Wayne Carey's
satisfied observation as he leaned back in his chair at last, after
draining his third cup of coffee--and the pot itself, if he had but known
it.
"Went to the spot?" asked Anthony, leaning back also with the expression
of the friendly host. He was young to cultivate that expression, but he
appeared to find no difficulty about it.
"It did--every last mouthful."
"Good. Now, if you fellows will come back to the fire and have a pipeful
of talk we shall not be missed. In this house on ordinary occasions we
reverse the order of after-dinner privileges--the men retire to the
atmosphere of the sofa-pillows, and the women--I'm not allowed to tell
what they do. But after remaining discreetly out of sight for some little
time, during which faint sounds as of the rattle of china penetrate
through closed doors, they reappear, pleasantly flushed and full of a sort
of relieved joy."
"I know what I wish," said Roger Barnes, looking back from the dining-room
doorway at young Mrs. Robeson; "I wish that when the dishes are all ready
you would let me know. I should like nothing better than to have a
dish-towel at them. I know all about it--my mother taught me how."
He looked so precisely as if he meant it, and the glance he sent past
Juliet at Rachel Redding was so suggestive of his dislike to be separated
for the coming hour from the feminine portion of the household, that his
hostess answered promptly: "Of course you may. We never refuse an offer
like that. We will try you--on promise of good behaviour."