“I will not, I assure you. It is not necessary, in the least. I’ll just finish off a small bit that I am engaged on at present, and then put the rest by until to-morrow.”
He returned to his work, and Margaret to her reading, and for a few moments the silence was unbroken, save by the sound of the wind and rain outside, and the soft little noises made by Louis with his pencil and rule.
Suddenly the door-bell rang, and, as before, they looked at each other regretfully. Louis was about to make the same proposition that his companion had responded to so promptly on the former occasion, but a look at Margaret’s face checked him. An instinct which she scarcely understood herself, made it impossible for her to do a thing like that now. The fact that she was conscious of feeling a strong liking for Louis, restrained her from giving such a proof of it as this would be.
“I am sorry to give up the music,” she said simply, as Thomas went by to the door, unchallenged. “There is still room to hope that it is a call that will not concern us.”
For a moment this seemed likely, as there was a short colloquy with Thomas at the door before the visitor was admitted, and even after that he lingered to remove his overcoat and rubbers in the hall, with a deliberation that implied a degree of familiarity that Margaret could not identify as belonging to any visitor at the house whom she had yet met.
The next moment, as Louis Gaston and herself were both watching the door-way, Major King appeared, tall, gaunt, and awkward, but eminently self-possessed.
His loosely hung, impractically tall figure was clad in the inevitable shiny black “best clothes,” that poor Margaret knew so well, even to the cut of the long frock-coat, with its flapping tails behind and its bagging, unhindered fronts, between which was displayed, through a premeditated opening in the vest, a modicum of white shirt-front, interrupted for an inch or so by the fastening of the upper buttons, only to reveal itself in more generous expansiveness higher up upon the Major’s manly bosom.
Margaret’s quick eye at once perceived the incongruity of the whole situation, and warned her of the necessity of effort on the part of all to reconcile and overcome it. She went forward and received Major King with the perfect politeness which was as natural to her as breathing, and then turned to present Mr. Gaston, who, with the folding-doors of the library opened wide, was quite as if he were in the same room.