Mrs. Kipley looked out of the window.
“Merciful sakes!” she ejaculated, startled.
Not an accident to Ned, John Carrington prayed, with stiff, dry lips and apprehensive eyes.
“Of all things!” Mrs. Kipley murmured; and her tone indicated that she was now past surprise, and merely numbered with the numb.
Some one was running up the veranda steps; the door was flung open, and a tall, dark, slender boy in a marvelous suit of dull gray velveteens stood on the threshold.
A long, crimson-lined cape was flung over his arm. He tossed it from him. And “Dad!” he cried, exultantly, and was across the room, with his arms around his father’s neck, and had kissed him on both cheeks.
“French fashion, dad!” he laughed, flushing suddenly.
“Now we’ll do it the Anglo-Saxon way;” and he caught both his father’s hands in his own and wrung them heartily. “It’s great to be home again,” he said, buoyantly.
And the joyful light in his eyes was unmistakably genuine.
John Carrington’s face softened amazingly. Happiness such as he had not known for six years gripped him. The warm ardor of his son’s embrace, the touch of the soft, boyish lips, unnerved him, but he liked it astonishingly. It was so naïf, so unspoiled, so reassuring against that dread of alienation he had endured, that he felt submerged in the warm, comfortable certitude of his son’s affection. He gripped the lad’s hands strongly, and surveyed him with a proud, fatherly interest.
The blue eyes that looked frankly into his own were like the lad’s mother’s, like Althea’s; the face that smiled gayly at him was alight with youthful energy, and the mouth, though the lips were a trifle full, had firm and resolute lines.
It was no dawdling dreamer that he saw, but an action-lover.
He nodded satisfiedly.
“You’ll do, lad,” he said, briefly.
Then he smiled as he caught sight of Mrs. Kipley, standing with the rigidity of an automaton, dust cloth in hand.
“You remember Mrs. Kipley,” he said, significantly. The boy wheeled instantly.
“Don’t I!” he said, laughingly, and something in his advance galvanized Mrs. Kipley into life again.
“None of your French fashions with me,” she said, severely, extending her right hand to him, less in greeting than as a rampart.
He swept a wonderful bow over it. Bent to it as a courtier might have done, and kissed its wrinkled, work-hardened back lightly. Then he straightened up to look her full in the eyes, and laughed his bubbling laugh once more.
“Do you still make those wonderful twisted doughnuts, Mrs. Kipley?” he asked, gayly. “I’ve bragged about them in Paris till they’re famous.”
Mrs. Kipley was scrutinizing the back of her hand minutely, to see if it was still intact. Finding it apparently uninjured, she drew breath and looked the surprising apparition in the face. Her own relaxed to his handsome, dashing youth and to his praise.
“I guess they’re about the same,” she said, dryly. But John Carrington chuckled to himself. He recognized the subjugation of Mrs. Kipley.
“What will he be with the young women!” he commented, to himself, amusedly.
Then he asked the question that was consuming Mrs. Kipley:
“Ned, are those clothes the style in Paris?”
The boy swung himself lightly into the big armchair beside the bed.
“They’re the badge of my craft, sir,” he said, good-humoredly, settling the soft cravat with deft fingers. “Don’t you like them?”
“Oh, I like them,” said John Carrington. (“Handsome lad!” he was whispering to himself, proudly.) “But I was wondering how they would strike Yellow Dog, that’s all.”
“There did seem to be some little interest in my arrival,” the lad admitted, gleefully.
“Sakes alive! They beat anything I ever see in all my life!” Mrs. Kipley communed with herself.
“And Elenore?” said John Carrington. “How did you leave Elenore?”
The boy stirred slightly in his chair.
“Elenore is well, dad. She wanted to come. I think she was a little disappointed that you didn’t want your daughter instead of your son.”
John Carrington shook his head.
“Yellow Dog is no place for a young lady, Ned,” he said. “It was better for her to stay with her friends. I should have liked to see her, though. She’s quite a woman, from her picture. Time for sweethearts, eh? Your Aunt Sarah wrote a good deal about a young Hastings. She seemed to think it might be serious.”
The boy flushed annoyedly.
“Aunt Sarah loves to fuss and exaggerate,” he said, and there was a slight coolness in his voice. “Maiden aunts are apt to, you know,” he went on, more naturally. He smiled his attractive smile once more. Whatever had perturbed him for the instant was past.
Miss Hematite Kipley, ætat seventeen, coming into the room with a fragrant bowl of syringa blossoms, compared it favorably with any picture her beloved romancers had been able to conjure up.
From the moment when she had seen the picturesque figure dismount and make a rapid way into the house, she had been perishing to make this entrance, but she had restrained herself in accordance with her ideas of propriety and gentility. Miss Kipley strove to be “elegant,” aided by certain open columns in respected periodicals, after which she patterned her conduct and her clothes.
The meeting between father and son she characterized as “a sacred moment,” and she regretted her mother’s continued intrusion upon it with the resigned exasperation of one who had often and fruitlessly pointed out to a primitive parent the proper forms of procedure.
Miss Kipley was rather pretty in a wholesome, buxom, blond way, and the “open columns” had stimulated her to a crisp freshness of attire, and partially reconciled her to the maternal regulations of its enforced simplicity.
She came into the room with her eyelids so demurely lowered that she might have been taken for a sleepwalker.
“Good-morning, Hemmy,” said John Carrington, with an outward courtesy which marked an inward amusement. In spite of her physical bulk, Miss Hematite was mentally transparent.
“Why, Hemmy!” said young Carrington, gayly, “how awfully pretty you have grown!”
Miss Kipley felt an inward commotion which threatened suffocation. Her fingers tightened on the blue bowl in a way which tested its enduring qualities. Mrs. Kipley’s maternal eye became vigilant.
There was a suggestion of a wrinkle on John Carrington’s brow. He hoped the boy would remember that this was not Paris; that the Kipleys represented the survival of a good many New England traits.
But neither parent could find anything to criticise in the way the lad relieved the blushing Hemmy of the bowl, shook her hand in a cordial, unaffected way, and turned to set the white blossoms on the square ledge of the open window, where the breeze converted them into a spicy censer.
As for Hematite, though visibly she stood in a deep pink embarrassment, in fancy she trod the sunny slopes of romance. This was the way things happened in the books over which she pored, palpitant. She sought vainly for some appropriate expression of welcome.
“I guess Hemmy and me will let you have a chance to get acquainted. I can finish dusting by and by,” said Mrs. Kipley, tersely. “Your old room’s all ready for you, Mr. Ned. Come, Hemmy.”
That young person followed her mother mechanically from the room.
“Cat got your tongue?” inquired Mrs. Kipley, severely, in the hall. “For all you are forever reading about the proper way to