The Grafters. Lynde Francis
and she was reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.
"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."
"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me." Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early morning caller.
Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.
"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"
Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.
"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the Transcript."
"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper. Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a propeller blade on the Amphitrite trying to get here in time."
"I am so sorry—for the Amphitrite," she said. "But you are here, and in good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"
"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you—take your tickets, and so on."
"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things. And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over Europe?"
"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"
"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."
He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.
"You are hard with me, Elinor—always flinty and adamantine, and that sort. Have you no soft side at all?"
She laughed.
"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't be an anachronism."
"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"
"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of the house since father died."
"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little worries, Elinor?"
She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.
"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong enough to make it possible."
He looked at her with narrowing eyes.
"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it is that I haven't been able to open."
She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.
"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also—to Abigail and the trunk-packing."
He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful soul asserting itself boldly.
"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."
"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"
"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West—wherever it is you are going to hibernate."
"No," she said decisively; "you must not."
"Why?"
"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."
"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."
"I am not," she denied.
"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might over-persuade you."
Her eyes—they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue tints in stressful moments—met his defiantly.
"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."
"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."
Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.
"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me out of it entirely?"
It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.
"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to take all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a well-earned holiday—a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western somewhere?"
Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.
"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?" he queried.
"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go over the Western Pacific."
Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for time-killing purposes.
"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot better."
But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she would not withdraw it.
"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do; and we mean to be loyal to our salt."
Ormsby laughed.
"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."
"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so conscienceless as you men."
"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of conscience involved."
"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we have no right to sell."
He smiled leniently.
"All