"You certainly look improved," Irene cried, as she surveyed him admiringly. "You are quite tanned. Fishing or hunting every day, I suppose."
"Nearly," he answered.
"Cousin Kitty Langley is here to spend the night," Irene went on. "But I can't persuade her to come down to dinner. She is not hungry and is buried in a novel. She was at a tea this afternoon and ate too many sandwiches."
"Humph!" Mitchell sniffed, playfully. "You know that wasn't it. She asked Jincy to bring something up to her. She told me she simply would not break in on you two this first evening."
"Father is getting to be a great tease, Dick," Irene smiled. "The money he has made lately has fairly turned his head. Please don't notice him." The colored butler had come to the door, and stood waiting silently to catch her eye. Seeing him, she asked: "Is everything ready, Jasper?"
He bowed. He looked the ideal servant in his dark-blue suit, high collar, and stiff white waistcoat. A wave of revulsion passed over Mostyn. He was thinking of the crude dining-room in the mountains; Drake, without his coat, his hair unkempt; Mrs. Drake in her soiled print dress and fire-flushed face, nervously waving the peacock fly- brush over the coarse dishes; Ann and George, as presentable as Dolly could make them, prodding and kicking each other beneath the table when they thought themselves unobserved; John Webb, with his splotched face in his plate; and Dolly--the sweetest, prettiest, bravest, most patient little woman Time had ever produced, and yet, what had that to do with the grim demands of social life? Was his sister right? Was his interest in the girl grounded only in a subtle form of restrained passion? Would he tire of her; would he be ashamed of her, here amid these surroundings? In fancy he saw Mitchell staring contemptuously at the little interloper. After all, had any man the right to inflict an ordeal of that sort upon an unsuspecting child? Plainly, no; and there would be no alternative but for him to renounce city life and live with her in the mountains. But could he possibly do such a thing? Had he the requisite moral strength for a procedure so foreign from his nature? Was his desire for reformation as strong as he had once thought it? Perhaps his release from Marie Winship's threatening toils had something to do with his present relapse from good intentions. He remembered how he had been stirred by the impassioned words of the mystic tramp preacher. How clear the way had seemed at that sunlit moment; how intricate and difficult now!