“You’re foolish, very foolish. When shall I see you, then?”
“I’ll be along late in the afternoon sometime.”
“Very sorry; but father will expect me. It doesn’t seem quite kind to forsake him--when he’s so nice to me.”
“I suppose not; but bring him along. We’re all an unsociable lot. They say the Merriams and their connections are queer--I don’t like the word. Your uncle and I want you to raise the fallen reputation of the family. Do be conventional, whatever you do.”
“Oh, I shall be that,--commonplace even.”
“Don’t come down in those clothes!” Mrs. Forrest was descending the stairs.
When the front door had closed, Zelda sat down on the stairs and laughed softly to herself.
The black woman shuffled slowly into the hall and looked up gravely at the girl.
“Polly, I wish to see the footman the moment he returns to the house. And the butler’s work is very unsatisfactory; I shall have to let him go. And please say to the cook that there will be pie for dinner until further notice,--apple-pie with cheese. And the peasants,--they will be received by My Majesty on the lawn at five as usual, and largess will be distributed. Will you execute these commissions at once, Polly? Stand not on the order of your going--” She laughed down at the amazed colored woman and then ran swiftly up stairs.
She did not pause until she reached the candle-lighted table in the garret and knelt before it, with her face against her mother’s little book, and sobbed as though her heart would break.
The law offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr were tucked away in the rear of an old building that stood at the apex of a triangle formed by Jefferson Street and Commonwealth Avenue. The firm had been tenants of the same rooms for so many years that any outward sign of their occupancy had ceased to be necessary. There was, to be sure, a battered tin sign at the entrance, but its inscription could be read only by persons who remembered it from bygone days. The woodwork in the series of low rooms occupied by the firm had once been white, but it was now yellow, as though from years of intimacy with dusty file-boxes and law sheep. The library, the quaintest and quietest place in town, was marked by a pleasing twilight of antiquity. Across the hall the private rooms of the several partners were distinguished by their domestic atmosphere, to which the locust-trees that brushed the windows and the grained wooden mantels contributed.