Chapter 32 - Page 2

being the result of training, which had made her feel that it was a little bold for "ladies" to refer quite openly to "gentlemen."

"You sometimes read in the newspapers," said Tembarom, buttering his toast, "about ladies who are all alone in the world with a little income, but they're not often left alone with it long. It's like you said--you've got me; but if the time ever comes when you haven't got me just you make a dead-sure thing of it that you don't let any solicitous business gentleman treble your income in a year. If it's an income that comes to more than five cents, don't you hand it over to be made into fifteen. Five cents is a heap better--just plain five."

"Temple!" gasped Miss Alicia. "You--you surely cannot mean that you do not think Captain Palliser is--sincere!"

Tembarom laughed outright, his most hilarious and comforting laugh. He had no intention of enlightening her in such a manner as would lead her at once to behold pictures of him as the possible victim of appalling catastrophes. He liked her too well as she was.

"Sincere?" he said. "He's sincere down to the ground --in what he's reaching after. But he's not going to treble your income, nor mine. If he ever makes that offer again, you just tell him I'm interested, and that I'll talk it over with him."

"I could not help saying to him that I didn't think you could want any more money when you had so much," she added, "but he said one never knew what might happen. He was greatly interested when I told him you had once said the very same thing yourself."

Their breakfast was at an end, and he got up, laughing again, as he came to her end of the table and put his arm around her shoulders in the unconventional young caress she adored him for.

"It's nice to be by ourselves again for a while," he said. "Let us go for a walk together. Put on the little bonnet and dress that are the color of a mouse. Those little duds just get me. You look so pretty in them."

The sixteen-year-old blush ran up to the roots of her gray side- ringlets. Just imagine his remembering the color of her dress and bonnet, and thinking that anything could make her look pretty! She was overwhelmed with innocent and grateful confusion. There really was no one else in the least like him.

"You do look well, ma'am," Rose said, when she helped her to dress. "You've got such a nice color, and that tiny bit of old rose Mrs. Mellish put in the bonnet does bring it out."

"I wonder if it is wrong of me to be so pleased," Miss Alicia thought. "I must make it a subject of prayer, and ask to be aided to conquer a haughty and vain-glorious spirit."

She was pathetically serious, having been trained to a view of the Great First Cause as figuratively embodied in the image of a gigantic, irascible, omnipotent old gentleman, especially wrought to fury by feminine follies connected with becoming headgear.