"Fortunate coat," murmured Archie, grasping the allusion. "But who's asking her to look at me, Mrs. Neal? I'd rather she wouldn't, really! I'd much rather look at her. When you come right down to it, I'm sort of proud myself!--But if I just happened to be at the front door when you start out," he wheedled, "you wouldn't really object to my simply--well, to my merely--"
"Making a fool of yourself? Go as far's you like!" interrupted Ellen tartly, closing her door in his face.
So it chanced that as Joan stood at the threshold sometime later waiting for Ellen to follow downstairs, making an unconscious picture in her sweeping hat and her soft furs between the graceful pillars of the lintel, Mr. Blair appeared nonchalantly before her. And the effect of the encounter was so great that, intending to lift his hat and toss away his cigarette with a Chesterfieldian carelessness, he instead tossed his hat and lifted his cigarette,--a catastrophe that robbed him for the moment of the powers of speech and motion. He had not expected to follow out Ellen's program quite so literally.
Joan's training stood her in good stead. Her lips twitched but remained in control. The elaborateness of his surprise, together with Ellen's rather guilty countenance, had already informed her that she was the victim of a plot, into which she walked obligingly.
"Well met, Mr. Blair! I wonder whether you have anything very important to do? If not, _would_ you be good enough to take me home? Ellen really ought not to go out in the night air with her rheumatism."
"Dee--lighted," murmured Mr. Blair dazedly, in the language of his favorite hero. He recovered his hat, and with it some of his former aplomb. Indeed, as he walked away with his prize, solicitously steering her by one elbow, he was able to wink back over his shoulder at his fellow-conspirator.
It was the first time that he had been really alone with the One and Only. Hitherto their conversation had taken place against a background of other conversations, which were somehow helpful. Even when he had paid his two party calls in rapid succession, there had been others present; and though the inexplicable step-mother had quite obviously made opportunities for him to cut her out of the herd, so to speak, his nerve at the critical moment had always failed him.