The Scollard girls of all sizes, and Gretta too, closed up around Ralph under the light of a street light to gaze at him after his amazing announcement.
"Mrs. Jones-Dexter your great-aunt!" cried Happie.
"That fault-finding, snappish person!" gasped Laura.
"That lovely little child your cousin!" exclaimed Margery.
"There's nothing flattering in your remark, Margery. What kind of a cousin would I be likely to have except a lovely little child? You'd expect a family resemblance, wouldn't you?" demanded Ralph. "If you girls get wonder-struck and stand bunched up on this corner long, we'll all be run in by a policeman, under the law that forbids push-carts and things blocking the sidewalks."
Happie laughed and set an example to the others by moving on at once. "You can't expect us to hear such a surprising piece of news as this unmoved," she said.
"No, but you were hearing it unmoved; that's what I was talking about," retorted Ralph. "There's no use in getting stirred up. Mrs. Jones-Dexter was my mother's aunt before I was born—there's nothing new about it."
"Well, but Ralph, we should like to hear how it happened," said Laura eagerly.
"By her being my grandmother's sister, Laura," Ralph kindly explained.
"Oh, no!" cried Laura impatiently. "I mean how she came to be so cross, and you not know her—you don't know her, do you?"
"Never saw the lady, never knew she had a granddaughter until this very night as now is," affirmed Ralph. "There isn't an interesting story; I'm sorry, for your sake, Laura, because you might write music for it. My great-aunt Lucinda seems to be a person troubled with chronic, all-round incompatibility. She quarreled with everybody belonging to her if they dared to have a mind of their own. Mother always said she had a grievance against the world because it revolved on its own axis. She never had a fuss with mother directly, but she fell out with her sister, mother's mother, when my mother was a little girl, and she wouldn't make up, not if the skies fell—or grandmother fell on her knees. Grandmother wasn't a bit like her—dear soul, grandmother was, and it worried her to be on the outs with her sister, but she could never coax her on the ins. And the gentle Lucinda included mother in her scrap, because mother was grandmother's daughter, and that's why we never knew her. Aunt Lucinda married this immensely wealthy Mr. Jones-Dexter, and after that, when grandmother was dead and mother a widow without much money, why she didn't like to try to patch up the row for fear Mrs. Jones-Dexter would misunderstand her motives. We knew Mr. Jones-Dexter died—he was too rich to die privately, so to speak—and we heard that Aunt Lucinda quarreled bitterly with her only son—couldn't make him marry the girl she had picked out—and he died 'way off somewhere. This little Serena must be his child. I wonder where the mother is? Aunt Lucinda must have taken her grandchild into favor."
"Into favor doesn't express it," said Margery. The girls had listened to this outline sketch of family history so intently as to endanger their feet and passers-by, in their oblivion to all else. "She is perfectly wrapped up in her, and her love for her is evidently her absorbing passion. She is so proud of her, so tender of her, looks so adoringly at her that you never saw anything like it! Really, I wish you could see your little cousin, Ralph, I can't do her justice."
"I'm not likely to see her," said Ralph. "Very likely Aunt Lucinda was sorry for driving her son off, especially as people say the girl he cared for was nice in every way, only she wasn't the one his mother had picked out. Probably she is conscience-stricken, as unjust, bad-tempered people are at the end, in story books, and she is making up to this little Serena for all her life-long injustice. Old age ought to count for a good deal, too; that seems to be something that makes the strongest will knuckle under."
"Mrs. Jones-Dexter must be dreadful," said Polly with conviction.
"She must have led a dreadful life," said Ralph kindly. "It must be pretty bad to have your shoulder bruised your whole life long from keeping chips on it all the time! I'd hate to spend seventy years on the home plate with my bat up, ready to hit any old ball, foul or fair. Look out, Happie! These are the elevated road stairs. You want to pick up your feet, my child!"
Happie laughed. Ralph had just saved her from falling, face downward, up the stairs. She was so interested in what he was saying that she had tripped on her own skirt and Laura's trailing umbrella.
"You needn't fumble for your pocket book, Margery. Bob gave me a strip of L tickets to bring you home. He's a terror on insisting on strict justice," said Ralph, producing a dark-pink jointed strip of pasteboard and dropping it whole into the ticket chopper's box. "I had precisely the right number for the crowd."
"And we always settle with Bob. Our car fares are part of the expenses of the tea room," said Margery. "We all believe in not being slovenly about such little items."
"I never thought the people in the next flat were lacking in squareness," observed Ralph, steadying Penny who lurched wildly as the train started. "Hold me around the knee, Pfennig; there's no use tumbling about until you've grown tall enough to reach the strap!"
"You know you might see little Serena Jones-Dexter," said Happie suddenly. She had evidently been following her own line of thought from a remark of Ralph's which had long been left behind in the course of the talk.
"Easy to see through you, Happie!" said Ralph. "You've been carrying on the story through several chapters, and you haven't decided whether you will let me—the hero—dash into the burning Jones-Dexter mansion and bear out the flower-like darling through the flames, or whether you'll inveigle me on the steam-boat from which Serena is to tumble overboard for me to rescue, or whether you will just get me down to the tea room when the old lady is expected, take me by my lily white hand and lead me up to that great aunt of mine—say, she is a great old aunt, isn't she?—and say: 'Mrs. Jones-Dexter, look on your long-lost, your beautiful boy!' That's the best way, Happie. None know me but to love me, you know, so it's all that's necessary, and it will save the wear and tear on little Serena."
"Ralph, you perfect goose!" exclaimed Happie, half laughing, half teased. For though she had not been entertaining such melodramatic schemes as Ralph attributed to her, she had been plotting how to work good to all concerned by bringing together Mrs. Jones-Dexter and her niece's family.
"I think the tea room is wonderful," said Gretta suddenly. "It is so interesting, as well as bringing in so much money. We had such music to-day, Ralph! You haven't told Ralph about that queer man and how he played."
"Hans Lieder," said Happie. "No, but we never could tell any one how he played! Ralph, it was wonderful. He is a man in a cloak and sombrero and he comes so much that we wish—or we did wish—he wouldn't. We were half afraid of him; we called him the Mystery, and we thought he looked like Mephistopheles. But to-day I talked to him a little while, and I thought he looked sad. He has always seemed interested in Laura's playing, and to-day he played for us. Ralph, you don't know how he plays! He's a great musician. I wish you could hear him."
Laura looked at Ralph very seriously. "I am going to write a song for him, words and all. It is going to be very beautiful,—sad, maybe, but beautiful," she said. "I am going to show how he came cloaked and shadowy, like the dawn, and how he burst forth, like the morning, with all the beauty, the music of the world. It will probably be my best song, for I would do anything to pay him for the way he played. I'm not afraid of him, like the girls, because I'm a musician too. Musicians and poets are never understood."
Laura looked at Ralph with a seriously uplifted expression on her pale little face, and Ralph looked down on her perplexed. She was such a funny contrast to the crowded aisle, the jarring car, even to her own thirteen years. Ralph never could manage to like Laura, nor be patient with her. He rightly thought that she shirked her share of the family burdens, yet, like Happie, who understood her better, he was sometimes impressed with the queer child's cleverness shining out through her conceit.
"Well, I think I'd go slow on writing songs to mysterious musicians in dramatic cloaks," Ralph advised Laura now. "What did you say the man's name was?"
"He said when I asked him that we might call him Hans Lieder, but I'm certain that's not a real name," said Happie.
"Do you know what I believe?" asked Laura standing on tiptoe to whisper so that Happie and Ralph, but not the crowd around them might hear her. "I believe he is the spirit of Chopin come back in another body."
She fell back triumphantly to observe the effect of her words, but it was not what she had intended it to be. Happie and Ralph shouted out in girl and boy fashion. Laura lost her balance as she dropped back and down from her toe tips, the car stopping, lurched forward, and she took an unsentimental header straight into a big man who was reading stock market reports, and whose face turned as angry as the maddest of the Wall Street bulls, while his coat felt to Laura as shaggy and rough as the coat of the grizzliest bear.
"Don't stop to apologize; this is our station," said Ralph, taking the bewildered and mortified Laura by the arm and pushing her towards the door through the crowd that blocked their way.
It was the rule in the Patty-Pans that after dinner there were to be lessons every night except Sunday and on festivals. It was an undecided question as to whether family birthdays were to be reckoned festivals or not. The trouble was there were so many that celebrating all of them cut off a good many nights from study for children who were limited to night for their lessons. Mrs. Scollard was her children's teacher. The eldest three had been to school very little, Laura less, and Polly and Penny not at all. Mrs. Scollard hoped by another year to send Laura for the beginning of a musical education, that should include general study, and to launch Polly on the sea of school life.
There had never been a choice as to methods of education in Margery and Happie's case; the loss of fortune that had made the mother the support of the family, had forced the two elder girls early to take up the office of housekeepers who could not be at school.
Mrs. Scollard felt safer to have the younger ones at home with their sisters while she was away than to let them go to school. So the Scollards were homeeducated by the teaching of a mother qualified beyond most women for her task.
When a birthday came around it was always a question whether it warranted the omission of lessons or not. Happie looked imploringly at her mother after dinner and said insinuatingly: "Polly was never ten years old until to-night, motherums! Don't you think we might mark the occasion by dropping all other lessons and taking up chemistry, demonstrating how heat changes butter, chocolate, milk and sugar into fudge?"
Mrs. Scollard hesitated and was lost. Penny leaped on her lap to hug her for a consent which she read in her mother's eyes, and Polly cried in a staid sort of rapture: "This will make my birthday perfect—dancing school and fudge!"
Flats are an invention for which to be grateful. Without them how would homes be possible to people with little strength, less income and no space? But they have their drawbacks, like everything else in an imperfect world, and not least of these is the way sounds and odors wander from one end of them to the other, owing to the arrangement which Happie had called "the Patty-Pan style of architecture." No one can safely talk secrets in a flat, and no one can brew secret potions, for good intent or ill, in the most distant end of their elongated connections.
Happie had her specialty well under way in the little kitchen, and Laura, who was still under the spell of the wizard playing of the afternoon, found it impossible to keep to her seat at the piano, or the composition of her song, in the fudge-burdened atmosphere of the little parlor. She gave it up, and was coming out to join the less gifted young folk in the kitchen when the bell rang through the little flat; the upper bell, so that whoever had come was already at the threshold, having entered the outer door without ringing below. Laura opened the door, and there stood Mrs. Barker and Elsie beautifully attired.
"Oh!" ejaculated Laura, and it was perfectly evident that her first feeling was dismay, not welcome, her consciousness of the odor of fudge overwhelming hospitality. "Yes, mamma is in. And Happie and Gretta, yes, Elsie," Laura said, rallying. "If you will please wait a moment, I will call them."
"I wish I could go out where Happie is. She's making fudge, I smell it, and we all know Happie's fudge of old," said Elsie.
"Just one minute, Elsie, and Happie will come. I've no doubt you can go out to see her make the fudge then." Laura's dignity was impressive. She carried it with her around the corner of the parlor, into the little hall, but she ran down the latter to the kitchen, shedding the dignity on the way.
"The Barkers, of all people!" she announced in a stage whisper. But Mrs. Scollard did not seem dismayed, and Happie said without looking up from the pan which claimed all her attention, "Send Elsie out here; this is at the point when it can't be left."
Mrs. Scollard went in at once with Laura, who came back to say that Mrs. Barker would like to see Margery, Happie and Gretta Engel, if she might.
"Oh, dear, Laura, I truly can't leave this fudge now without spoiling it! Tell Elsie to come out here, and ask Mrs. Barker if she will be kind enough to give me a quarter of an hour? Then we'll all come in. What can the mystery be?" Happie asked the question of Margery; Laura had already departed.
"I think it has something to do with Gretta's saving Elsie the day of the sleigh ride," whispered Margery. "I've been wondering that she didn't hear from the Barkers."
"My goodness! They've probably brought her the Victoria cross, or the Legion of honor, or a Carnegie medal, or whatever they give for saving fair maidens! Oh, Margery, will you go and see that Gretta makes herself look her prettiest? If I beat this fudge like mad I'll be ready to go in there by the time you are—she is—ready."
Margery willingly departed to see that Gretta was a credit to herself and to Happie, whose care for the big girl, no younger than she was, amused the Patty-Pan family. Happie was as good as her word, and came into the room where Margery was superintending Gretta's toilette two minutes before she had finished.
"I do not see why I must go," Gretta was protesting for the fifth time. She had not recovered from her shyness, and dreaded strangers nearly as much as she dreaded a dentist.
"Because they have asked for us, all three of us," said Happie. "Did you ever see such a red face as mine is? Please button the middle button of my waist, Margery; it's undone. Now, courage, Gretta! You have already met Elsie, to put it mildly, and you needn't mind Mrs. Barker. You weren't afraid of Auntie Cam."
It always seemed to Margery and Happie that Gretta looked far better out of doors. There was something dwarfing to her beauty in the Patty-Pans. Still, it was a handsome creature that followed the two Scollards into the parlor and rather stiffly laid her hand in Mrs. Barker's as that lady arose to greet her. Elsie kissed her with genuine cordiality. Mrs. Barker eyed her keenly, and then said:
"They have not exaggerated your good looks, my dear; they positively could not do so. I have never seen you, and now that I do see you how can I thank you for what you did for my little girl?"
Happie expected to see Gretta sink under the embarrassment of this speech, beginning with the most unlimited flattery and ending in an allusion to her courage. But keen-witted Gretta perceived the bad taste of the opening, and her sense of humor put her at her ease.
"I should not like to have you thank me," she said pleasantly.
"Ah, but I came here expressly to do so!" returned Mrs. Barker. "This is the first opportunity I have had, but you may imagine how I have burned to see the brave girl to whom Elsie owes, if not her life, undoubtedly the fact that she is not a cripple." Mrs. Barker prided herself on her eloquence; she addressed meetings of all sorts on every occasion, but this sentence had not turned out as well as she had expected it to. She began again: "For one thing, Mr. Barker and I have consulted each other, and thought long on what form our thanks should take. I have come here to beg a favor of you, my dear Gretta—you will let me call you Gretta?"
"Oh, please," said Gretta.
"Yes. Mrs. Scollard, Margery and Happie, I beg that you will plead with your friend for me that I may have my way. I understand, Gretta, that you have a little property somewhere in the country, but not enough to enable you to seize the advantages of a desirable education. I desire to give you six years at an excellent school, a boarding school. I desire you to be placed where you will have every advantage, not only of education of the mind, but of refined association, so that at the end of the six years, when you are twenty-one years old, you will be prepared to take your place among young women of your own age, their equal in cultivation, manners, accomplishments, as you will be their superior in beauty. Mrs. Scollard, please add your voice to mine. Gretta probably does not realize what this would do for her."
"Gretta, dear, you do realize it, I know," said Mrs. Scollard softly. She laid her hand on Gretta's. "You will not refuse, will you? It will change all your life."
Gretta shook her head. "Thank you, thank you very much, but I couldn't go, Mrs. Barker," she said.
"Not because you want to stay with me, Gretta!" cried Happie, rising to throw her arms around Gretta. "You would come to us in every vacation, and it wouldn't separate us, not really. You will take this chance, Gretta?"
"No," said Gretta quietly, "I can't."
"You will ruin your life, child!" protested Mrs. Barker.
Again Gretta shook her head. "I study at night, and I read a great deal with Happie. And I learn how to be part of what you said—I think I couldn't have a better teacher of manners." She put her other hand over Mrs. Scollard's resting on her left one. "It's very good of you, but I think I can't accept your offer."
"I hope it isn't pride," said Mrs. Barker.
"I hope not," said Gretta with a smile. "It would be very silly, sillier than it would be wrong, for why should I be proud? It's just that I can't, thank you."
"Won't you leave the offer open a few days? Let us talk to Gretta. I think she ought to accept the chance to get all that she always desired, Mrs. Barker," said Mrs. Scollard.
"Certainly," said Mrs. Barker rising. "Consider it for a week, two weeks, and let me know your decision. No, I really must not stay another moment. The carriage is waiting, and it is cold for the horses. Gretta, whatever you decide I am very grateful to you. Come and see Elsie. Margery and Happie, your tea room makes it harder than ever to catch a glimpse of you! Do come to see us! Good-night, dear Mrs. Scollard; it is a pleasure to find you so much stronger than last winter. Change your mind, Gretta, I beg of you! Good-night, dear people."
Mrs. Scollard summoned Bob to attend their guests to their carriage, and as soon as the door was well closed behind them Happie flew at Gretta.
"I couldn't imagine why you were so sure right away that you wouldn't let her send you to school," she cried. "But the minute she said 'tea room' it flashed upon me! Gretta, we can get on without you! Do you think it would be right to refuse an education for that tea room?"
Gretta looked as guilty as if she had been caught dynamiting a safe. "We all have as much as we can do," she said. "I think this winter I'd better help you. Besides, I'm getting all the education I need—a better one than in school, in lots of ways. If you want to get rid of me, Happie——" She paused, laughing out of her dark eyes, and Happie promptly choked her. "You goose!" she said.
Bob came up two steps at a time. He had heard of the offer from Mrs. Barker. "Good for you, Gretta; we can't spare you!" he cried. "Besides, you're educated now! No one can drive, make butter, do heaps of things like you. Bother education!"
"Yes, it is a bother," assented Gretta.
Miss Bradbury came in the next day, which was Sunday, to dine with the Scollards on her way home from church. At least she said it was on her way home, although she lived not far from the Washington Arch and had been to church near Fiftieth Street, and the Patty-Pans was in the belt of lower rents above the upper entrance to Central Park. But the Scollards were used to her whimsical statements and were too glad to get hold of her on any terms to dispute her topography.
Aunt Keren-happuch struck them all as looking pale and tired. They had not seen her in two weeks and Mrs. Scollard was troubled by the weary look which, to her eyes, energetic Miss Keren wore. She indignantly denied feeling less well than usual, and told Gretta that if her looks were changed it must be by her descent from the mountains to the soiled damp air of the seaboard city.
Miss Keren found the Scollards, or at least the mother and her two eldest daughters, urging Gretta to let Mrs. Barker send her to school. Mrs. Scollard was disturbed by Gretta's firmness; it frightened her lest the girl should blight her entire life when she was too young to realize the full effect of her refusal. Most of all she was troubled because Happie believed that Gretta was refusing in order to help her friends through that busy winter.
"Oh, Miss Keren, help me convert Gretta!" cried Mrs. Scollard. "I have said everything that I can think of, but she won't listen to reason."
"That means she won't see things as you do; 'reason' is always my opinion, and 'unreason' the other person's, just as 'orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other man's doxy,'" commented Miss Keren. "What am I to convert Gretta to? Has she been turning heathen?"
"You know the Dutch are always obstinate," said Gretta quietly.
"Heathen? No," said Bob quickly. "They are worrying for fear Gretta is turning too Christian, and loving her neighbor better than herself; they want you to convert her to paganism."
"I'm fresh from church," remarked Miss Keren. "Suppose you tell me the case."
They told it to her in a trio of Mrs. Scollard, Margery and Happie, while Gretta sat by listening and smiling in a most detached, impersonal way.
The Scollards felt quite sure of an ally in Miss Keren, who was always anxious to help people on in the world and who would fully realize what six years in a good school would mean to Gretta. To their unbounded surprise, when they were through with their story Miss Keren said decidedly: "Gretta is perfectly right. She is getting all the training—mental training—here that she needs, and a great deal else that no school could give her. Then I think you need her this winter. Wait! I wouldn't advise letting that stand in the way of larger interests. If Gretta were losing by staying I couldn't say that it would be just, but she isn't. And she is very essential to you, dividing forces as you are between here and the tea room. And last, but not least, of reasons: I don't care for your Barker acquaintances, Charlotte, and I think an education received from Mrs. Barker would be a burden, a sort of mortgage on Gretta. You'd see that Mrs. Barker would forget about the gratitude which prompted her gift, and remember only Gretta's debt to her. It has been my experience that it required the nicest sort of people at whose hands to receive a favor that should not be most burdensome. The Barkers are shoddy. On all accounts I think Gretta is in the right to refuse. And I think the future may hold something quite as good for her, which need not be refused."
Gretta fairly beamed. "You dear Miss Bradbury," she said. "I felt so dreadfully sure you would be on the other side! I couldn't express my own meaning as you have done it for me, but you think just as I do. I'm ever so much obliged to you."
"You're entirely welcome. But I don't think they would have had their way with you, even if I had been on their side, would they?" laughed Miss Keren.
Gretta laughed too, but shook her head decidedly. "You know Madison County is all rocks, and I was born and brought up there. I guess I caught the rockiness when I was growing. I'm as obstinate as the rest of the Dutch!" she said.
When Miss Keren departed, early after dinner, Margery, Happie, Gretta and Bob went with her down town for the sake of the walk home again at sunset. It was a walk of over six miles, but not too far coming up through the park in the wintry wind, sharp and dry, with the down-dropping sun lighting the skeleton of the trees into a beauty not inferior to that of the summer verdure.
"No, she certainly does not look well," Gretta agreed with Margery as they turned their faces up town when the door had closed behind Miss Bradbury in the large apartment house where she lived alone with her two maids.
"But Aunt Keren couldn't be ill," Happie declared optimistically. "I don't believe she would know how to be, and sickness would have to leave her for lack of a proper reception."
"We'll go down and see her in a few days," said Margery, looking unconvinced.
"We will if we can get there," amended Happie. "You and I in the tea room, Laura helping us half the day and helping Gretta at home the other half of it, there isn't much chance of our doing anything but our work before another Sunday."
"You're not wearying of well-doing, Happie?" hinted Bob.
"Now, Robert, who said anything that sounded like that?" demanded Happie reproachfully. "I was merely stating facts. Do you think that I could weary of doing as well as we do there? Do you realize that with your promotion and your five dollars more a week, and our tea room, we are making up the other half of dearest motherum's salary which she wasn't strong enough to earn this winter? We clear twenty dollars a week at the worst, and Margery and I are laying by money to give—or to offer to give—Aunt Keren for rent, besides. We don't feel comfortable knowing we aren't paying our own rent, especially as she can't afford to do it."
"Rather a ticklish matter to pay back a Christmas present," remarked Bob.
"Not to Aunt Keren," said Happie. "She will know just how we mean it, and she'll see a business ought to pay its own expenses, if it can."
"That's one of the nicest things about Auntie Keren," said Margery. "She never misunderstands one, always takes everything precisely as one says it, and construes it by her experience of what one is likely to mean. She may be brusque, and I suppose people who don't know her think she is too much so, but I think there's more real amiability under her even-tempered bluntness than there is in sweetness that doesn't hold out."
"A good deal," agreed Happie emphatically. "I think people who get hurt and offended easily have the worst of hard dispositions, for they always pride themselves on their sensitiveness, and blame everybody else."
"And I think," said Gretta quietly, "that this day is one of those pleasant things you are talking about, that can't be depended upon to hold out."
"Going to be a change?" drawled Bob, imitating the accent of Jake Shale, who had worked for the Scollards the previous summer on the farm.
"I guess," retorted Gretta in like accent. "There's such an east wind blowing. What fur a ring is that round the sun? Storm, say not?"
The three Scollards laughed aloud with such enjoyment that two or three passers-by smiled in sympathy. The dialect of Madison County sounded odd and pleasant, bringing the picture of the Ark in its green fields into handsome Fifth Avenue.
They got home to the Patty-Pans cold and hungry, wholesomely tired for a good night's sleep. When they awakened weather-wise Gretta was proved a competent prophet, and the beautiful Sunday but what old people call "a weather breeder." A cold rain was falling, mingled with hail. It froze as it fell, and the stone paved sidewalks were as great a menace to human beings as was the asphalt upon which the poor horses were slipping and straining in a manner painful to see.
"Margery, you let me go down with Happie to-day," said Gretta. "I am surer-footed and stronger than you are. And we can get on without either Laura or Polly. Nobody will be out to-day who can stay in. It's fearful walking. Happiness and I will go down to the tea room; the rest of you stay here. Oh, there goes a horse!"
Gretta covered her eyes, shuddering. Her love for horses was a passion with her, and it was almost more than she could bear to see their suffering as they strove for a foothold on the wet or sleeted asphalt, falling to their death from the bullet that would end the pain of a broken leg, or, worse, when they strained into an injury not immediately fatal, but incurable.
"I don't see how you can live in New York!" she gasped, turning away from the window with a white face, as the latest victim was helped to his feet by feed bags placed under them.
"Are you ever homesick, Gretta?" asked Happie with a sudden suspicion.
"No, because you are all here, but, oh, wouldn't you rather be up in the mountains where the air is dry and clear than here, crowded up, in this wet wind, with horses ruined before your eyes?" cried Gretta.
"Poor Gretta! I believe you do miss your mountains!" said Margery gently.
"Home is home," said Gretta. "But not without you all," she added hastily.
Margery found the day long. From its beginning to its close walking was not less dangerous, and she had visions of her mother, Happie, even sure-footed Gretta, coming home in an ambulance, with broken bones. Laura played dismal music all the gray day till Margery almost screamed, but if it made Laura happy to be miserable gentle Margery did not like to thwart her, so bore the minor strains uncomplainingly.
It was a great relief when her mother came back safe and sound, a little earlier than usual, for Margery had been more anxious about her than about the girls. They, too, arrived with every bone intact, having triumphed over the pitfalls set that day by nature, but they came alone and late.
"Where's Bob?" asked Mrs. Scollard. The boy of the family never failed in escort duty to his sisters, unless he sent a substitute.
"That's what we are wondering," said Happie. "We waited fifteen minutes for him, then we locked the door and waited more than five minutes outside, then we came on without him. Isn't it strange?"
"He would have telephoned if he couldn't come, unless——" Gretta stopped herself.
"Unless he couldn't telephone," Mrs. Scollard finished the sentence for her. "Polly, run down-stairs, dear, and see if any message has been neglected by the boy."
Polly started to obey, but a rap on the door as she neared it checked her, and Happie opened it to Snigs, Snigs with a queer, excited face and a suppressed manner.
"Oh, hallo, Happie!" he said with forced jauntiness. "I came to tell you that Bob sort of slipped—tumbled down, like a chump, and he thinks he hurt his ankle, and he was afraid you mightn't like it—I mean he was afraid you'd be afraid it was worse than it is, so he sent me ahead to tell you it was nothing bad."
"Where is Bob?" cried Mrs. Scollard hastening forward.
"He telephoned Ralph to meet him. He's down-stairs at the door. I guess he's got to wait for the janitor to help him up—he came home in a cab," said Snigs.
"Oh, dear!" groaned Laura always ready to meet a sensation sensationally, and Margery looked aghast, remembering how her mother had come home in a carriage, completely broken down, less than a year before.
"Let's go see, motherums!" said Happie cheerfully, though she was badly frightened.
They had not got down one flight of the three between them and the lower hall, when they heard slow steps and many of them, and saw Bob trying to smile at them above the shoulders of Ralph, the stout German janitor, the colored fireman and the hall boy as they carried him up-stairs.
Bob declaimed, setting Ralph's skating cap, which he imperatively borrowed, rakishly on one eye to give point to his quotation.
"Bob, my dear Bob, what has happened?" cried his mother.
"I'm like Tennyson's Brook, mother; 'I slip, I slide'—I don't 'gleam,' though. It wasn't a long plan of mine. I just sat down on the icy sidewalk to mature it, and when I got up—well, I didn't get up,—to make a bull—I was pulled up." Bob cheerfully called this information up the stairs to his anxious mother, smiling into her down-bent face, and entirely indifferent to what the other tenants might think of his nonsense.
"It's a sprain or a strain, Mrs. Scollard; it isn't anything serious," Ralph corroborated. "But Bob can't join one of Mrs. Stewart's classes this week."
The doctor came and bandaged Bob, pronouncing his hurt one that would recover in a reasonable time if he did not try to force it.
Bob took his supper on the sofa that night, and the girls waited on him so devotedly that it was rather pleasant to be incapacitated.
But beneath his enjoyment of the hour, and of Ralph and Snigs' nonsense, which they brought over with them from the next flat and kept on tap all the evening, was an anxiety for the morrow and for the succeeding morrows. Bob was more than desirous to do his duty at the office, yet here he was, laid up!
Happie saw the worry and so did Margery, but where the loving elder girl could only grieve over it, the younger set about curing it.
After a confab with Margery, Gretta and Laura that night when the Gordon boys had gone, Happie came into Bob's room and seated herself on the edge of his narrow white bed.
"I have something to announce to you, Robert, my wounded hero," she said, smoothing the sheet comfortably under his chin. "I've been talking it over with the girls, and we can manage it. Gretta is to keep house here, Margery is to take charge of the tea room, Laura is to go there with her, and so is Polly, and Penny is to stay at home every day, except dancing school days. And I am going down to Mr. Felton's office every morning, and I'm going to do your work if I can, and if I can't I shall find some way to be useful."
"Well, I guess you won't!" cried Bob, his voice bristling with exclamation points.
"Well, I guess I will!" Happie mocked him. "Bob, I'd love to do it! I'm not afraid. And I know as much arithmetic as you do."
"You know enough, Happie, but you would have to learn the office work, and by the time you had learned it I should be back. And you, a girl, can't do errands. But it would be fine if you could keep my place for me," added Bob, seeing how crestfallen Happie looked. He had such unbounded faith in his sister's ability that he half wondered if she could not do what she wanted to do, after all.
"Then I may try!" cried Happie, brightening under Bob's hint of relenting.
"No use, Hapsie, but I wish there were," said Bob vaguely.
Happie talked her mother over, and in the morning had her way. The entire household, save Gretta, Bob and Penny, sallied forth in the dampness of the thawing ice of the day before, but with the sun climbing up to dry it off into a perfect day.
Happie presented herself with unexpected timidity in the office where Bob had served his apprenticeship to the world of business, and where the hope of the future smiled at him. Three young clerks looked at her speculatively, wondering at the youth of this very early client, and whether she had come to buy, sell, lease, or hire.
"Is Mr. Felton here?" asked Happie, and with her question her courage rose.
"He's inside," said the youngest of the clerks. "Want to see him? I'll take your message."
"Just tell him, please, that Robert Scollard's sister would like to see him. He has sprained his ankle and can't come down to-day," Happie said.
"Oh, that's a pity!" exclaimed one of the other clerks. "Yes, it's a shame!" chimed in the second. "Awful sorry," murmured the one who had risen to go to Mr. Felton.
Happie felt better; these lads evidently liked Bob.
Mr. Felton came out of his sanctum and smiled kindly at Bob's emissary.
"Sorry to hear that Scollard is laid up. Nothing serious, I hope?" he said.
"No, sir," said Happie. "But he can't use his foot, and won't be able to use it for at least a week. I came down because I want to take his place here until he is able to be about. I am quite good at accounts—we studied together—and I think I can be useful. Please let me try."
Mr. Felton laughed. "So you are made of the same cloth as your brother. It is exactly like him not to forget his duties here when he is hurt, but he needn't have sent you as a substitute; I can get along."
"He didn't send me, I came—but of course he was glad when I said I thought I could come. What shall I do first?" asked Happie, looking around in a businesslike way.
"Open those letters on your brother's desk, sort them into their classes; bills, paid and unpaid, applications for houses, offices, apartments, etc., and general correspondence. Then add up that rent roll there," said Mr. Felton indicating papers on Bob's desk. He went back into his inner office and Happie hung up her coat and hat on the hook pointed out to her by one of "the other boys," as she told herself, climbed on Bob's stool and went to work.
The three young men in the office were ready with suggestions and information and Happie accomplished her tasks fairly well through a day that was not as long as it would have been in an office further down in town. It was long enough, however, to her unaccustomed muscles, perched for so many hours on a stool that strained her knees, with her back bent over a desk.
"Shall I come back, Mr. Felton? To-morrow, I mean, and until Bob can come himself?" she asked when Mr. Felton bade his little force good-night.
"Why, if you like," he replied, smiling into Happie's eager face.
"I like it, if it helps," she said.
"Yes, it helps," said Mr. Felton. "You have done your brother's work to-day. Of course I don't know how much help you had." He glanced at the three young men, but they stood by Happie to a man.
"Oh, she only needed a hint or two," said the oldest. "Just a little showing with some things she had never run up against," added the one whom Happie liked best.
"She hasn't been any bother," said the youngest one, with a patronizing air that made Happie long to box his ears.
"Very well, I shall appreciate your not allowing my work to suffer through your brother's absence," said Mr. Felton with a polite bow. And so it was settled that until Bob was out again Happie was to be in the real estate business.
It was a tired but triumphant Happie, therefore, that came into the tea room to go home with her sisters under substitute Ralph's escort. The tea room was not far distant from Mr. Felton's office.
Bob listened to her account of the day with explosions of laughter that were inspired by admiration fully as much as by mirth.
"Hapsie, you're all kinds of a good fellow!" he said at the end of the recital. "I won't forget this in a hurry! But Gretta has been a trump too! She has looked after my bandages, and fed Penny and me well, and entertained me into the bargain. I think I've six pretty nice sisters!"
Bob beamed on the group of big and little girls, with a pat on Happie's arm and a special smile for Gretta, who blushed with pleasure and looked amply repaid for that day's work.
"Now wouldn't it be nice if I had gone to that school, as Mrs. Barker wanted me to, and there had been no one but Penny to stay at home?" she asked.
"Well, really, Gretta, you have the best of the argument to-day," said Mrs. Scollard smoothing the girl's hair as she brought a cushion for Bob's foot, and set the biggest orange before Happie.
Happie could not help feeling a little bit important and very much grown up as she brushed her gleaming hair before the mirror in her shady Patty-Pan chamber, preparing to go to business to take her brother's place.
The next room was Bob's, and, in spite of the portière over the connecting door, it was easy to hear Mrs. Scollard's voice as she anxiously consulted the man of the house and he replied.
"Do you think it is necessary, Bob? Can she really be useful? I so strongly dislike her going," Mrs. Scollard was saying.
"Well, I'll tell you, mother," Bob began. "Would you just hand my old coat out of the wardrobe, like the angel mother you are? There's no use lolling about in my business suit. Thanks. I'll tell you: it isn't precisely necessary, but I think—I know—it will please Mr. Felton to have Happie down. You see it shows a desire on our part to serve him, and he has been mighty nice to me. All the other three fellows there think he's inclined to favor me. And of course she can be useful, even if she can't go ahead as I could."
"She's so young, Bob,—only fifteen! And she's such a frank, friendly creature that she's sure to expect to find friends in an office as she finds them everywhere. And I am troubled lest she encounter something unpleasant." Mrs. Scollard's soft voice was not enough stifled by the door and portière to disguise its anxiety.
"Not down there, motherums. Those are three nice young chaps in the office; they'll be all right to Happie. One might be fresh—Dan Lipton—but I guess he'll be civil. It isn't like going to business, to go down to Felton's in my place. I know just what she'll be up against, you know, or I wouldn't let her do it. Maybe the little experience will be good for her; you can see she's delighted to try to help me out." Bob dropped his voice, but still Happie heard him, with a sensation of having been reduced in age some five years by the conversation.
How manly Bob was, and how businesslike in tone without trying to be so! Happie felt like a little girl who had suddenly discovered that the grown people did not enjoy playing house with her just as she enjoyed having them. But how fortunate she was in her brother who would not let her face anything untried except he first knew what she "would be up against!"
She came out to the savory breakfast which Margery and Gretta had prepared, somewhat subdued, but still ready to do her best to be useful in Mr. Felton's office, if not to be a thoroughly competent substitute for Bob.
For the next two days everything went smoothly and Happie secretly cherished the conviction that she was attaining her ambition and was really useful. The three young men, or "the two young men and that boy," as Happie mentally classified Mr. Felton's clerks, for she cordially disliked pert Dan Lipton, were most polite, ready to serve her, plainly desirous of being friendly, but treating "Scollard's nice little sister," as they called her among themselves, with a respect that convinced Happie of her success in playing her rôle with dignity.
The fourth day of her business career was Friday. It was also to be her last day, for Bob thought he should be able to resume his desk on Saturday, if one of the girls came with him to the door to give him a supporting shoulder in case of need.
Happie announced the joyful tidings on her arrival, and somehow it seemed to change the atmosphere around her. The two elder clerks became assiduous in their desire to serve her, and openly expressed their regret at the prospect of losing what one of them, inclined to sentiment and poetry, styled "the daily inspiration of her sunny face." But Dan Lipton was affected differently. Apparently he felt that there was no time to be lost if he wished to try his hand at teasing the vanishing little substitute, and he revealed, not only that teasing was his preferred amusement, but that his idea of teasing was that of the practical joker.
The livelong morning he made himself a nuisance to Happie, who bore good-naturedly jarrings of her stool which cost her blots; the loss of pen, paper, pencils, blotters; a low whistling close by her side that made addition next to impossible, and the copying of letters very difficult.
At noon there came into the office a man who went up to the eldest clerk's table and asked if he had on his list any desirable apartment for a young man—himself, he added—who had just arrived in New York and hoped to stay for many weeks. "I want good rooms with bath, in a thoroughly well-kept house," he said. "I don't care to turn in anywhere; I want the place recommended. A friend of mine told me I could rely on the house to which I might be sent by Mr. Felton's office."
Happie looked up, her attention attracted by the beautiful voice in which the stranger made known his wants, the pleasant accent, with the r's elided or softened, and the slight drawl, which, without being lazy, was most attractive in its leisurely effect. She saw a man much younger than she had looked for. She had been conscious of his unusual height as he entered, and expected to see him burdened with years proportioned to his inches. Instead she saw a man under thirty, lightly but strongly built, the grace of repose in his motions, which were, at the same time, lithe and alert. His face was handsome, rather from its expression and refinement than from regular beauty. His eyes, hair and mustache were uniformly brown, and the eyes were so filled with spirit and intelligence that they would have redeemed a face lacking the many charms possessed by this one.
"How nice he is!" thought Happie, surveying the newcomer from the vantage ground of his oblivion to her. "He looks as though he had been made just to illustrate the word gentleman. Even his clothes," this sharp-eyed young critic added in her thoughts.
"We don't carry men's apartments on our books," the clerk was saying, in the meantime. "But I can give you the addresses of two or three,—more if you like,—first-class places, where you will find what you want, if you find a vacancy at all."
"Thank you very much. I should like it exceedingly, if it isn't too much trouble," said the stranger. "It hardly seems fair to let you bother with it if the houses are not in your hands."
"It isn't very much trouble to jot down a few addresses," returned the clerk with a smile. "Dan, suppose you do it. Copy the numbers and names marked on this list." He tossed a paper over on Dan's desk as he spoke, then pushed a chair forward for the tall young man, with a gesture inviting him to take it, and returned to his own work.
Dan Lipton was sharpening a pencil. He shifted the knife into his left hand holding the pencil, and with his right reached across and laid the list of bachelor apartments on Happie's desk. "Here, junior clerk," he said. "That's about your size job. You do it."
Happie flushed. She was entirely ready to do anything any one asked of her, but she did not like the manner of the asking, and the fact that neither of Mr. Felton's older assistants had heard the saucy transfer, while the stranger had and was regarding her with surprise, and for the first time, made it particularly trying.
"If you don't care to do what you are told, Dan Lipton, you must speak to me properly if you hope to get me to help you," she said softly.
The boy laughed insolently. "Come, puss, don't get your back up," he said, leaning so far over the desk at which Happie sat that she almost fell off the other side of her stool, retreating from him. "You know you'll do anything I ask you. Don't pretend you're mad, just to get me to notice you. You're a nice little puss, if you're not stroked the wrong way."
Happie flushed scarlet. "Get off this desk," she said. "And if you dare to speak one more impertinent word I'll box your ears, and tell Mr. Felton why I did it."
She looked perfectly capable of carrying out her threat, but her anger delighted Dan's impish mood. He lolled forward a little further instead of obeying Happie's order to get back from her desk. He was evidently rolling up some sweet morsel of impertinence under his tongue, and there is no telling what form it might have taken but that a strong, nervous hand took him by the shoulder, while another stole up and seized him somewhere under his coat with a refreshing twist. Master Dan was straightened up vigorously, lifted from his stool, set down on it again with emphasis, and a sound cuff was administered first to his right and then to his left ear by the hand that relinquished his waistband.
"Now, then, sir," said the stranger in his delicious English, all labials, aspirates and vowels, apparently, "now, then, sir, you're only a cub but you need licking into shape, and I should be delighted to help in the task if I ever heard you speaking again to a young girl as I just heard you speak to this one." He turned to the amazed other two who had seen or heard nothing that preceded Dan's elevation and punishment, and smiled as he settled his cuffs. "I beg your pardon, I'm sure, if I've interfered in the discipline of this office, but this little girl was being annoyed by that stupid boy of yours, and I took it on myself to cuff him. I hope you don't mind."
The two clerks glanced at each other, at Happie, crimson, half laughing, half crying, at Dan, furious, but cowed, and they beamed appreciatively. "Not a bit!" they cried together.
"This young lady has been good enough to help us out here for the past four days, because her brother was laid up and she took his place. Dan has not been disagreeable till now. If we had caught him making a nuisance of himself—to her especially—we should have pounded him to pulp," said the elder.
"Certainly," agreed the visitor. "Fun is all right, but a boy must never forget what is due a lady. The trouble with you, Master Cub, is a wrong sense of humor. You'll have to learn that rudeness is never funny, much less clever. If you've copied the list I'll take it now, please."
"Copy your own lists," growled Dan. "I'll never touch a pen for you."
"A pencil would do as well," returned the stranger unperturbed, while Happie cried, "Let me copy the addresses, please. I am ever and ever so much obliged to you."
The tall young man laid the papers from Dan's desk on hers, bowing and laughing. "It wasn't the copying you minded then? And you're entirely welcome. We do enjoy a little muscle play once in a while, don't we?"
"Sometimes we do, when they're needed, and our own aren't strong enough," returned Happie, copying away for dear life, with her flushed cheek bent low over her paper. She finished the few lines of addresses quickly, and handed them to her defender with a grateful smile, slipping from her stool as she did so.
The young man took them, thanking her, and noting how youthful she was with her reddish brown hair standing out around her dimpled cheeks, and her skirt at ankle length. Then he took his departure, with renewed thanks to the senior clerk and a nod to Dan, who glared at him with a soul far from forgivingly at peace.
He left the office to a perturbed atmosphere. Happie was glad that this was her last day, though when it ended the two elder clerks bade her good-bye with unmistakable regret, and Mr. Felton thanked her solemnly for her great kindness in filling her brother's place and for her fidelity and cleverness in his interests.
At the tea room, when Happie arrived to go home with Margery and Laura, they were half shocked, half amused, and wholly impressed by her adventure of that day. Happie described her rescuer in enthusiastic terms and Margery was greatly interested.
"I should really think, from what you say, that it was some one I know!" she cried, as they started homeward and Happie paused for breath.
Happie caught the note in her voice as she made the discovery, and tossed her head. "No, indeed, Margery!" she declared positively. "This man was not a bit like any one you ever described. He is simple, has lovely manners, is not the least speck solemn nor affected. And handsome, and as manly!"
"Yes," said Margery quietly. "All that is precisely like some one I know, but of course I don't know your knight. How funny the boy must have looked, getting set down and his ears boxed! And how thoroughly he deserved it! But it was rather horrid, Happie dear. I'm glad that to-morrow Bob can resume his desk."
In the morning there was a little stir of excitement in the Patty-Pans, for Bob was going out, and it takes no more than that to agitate a family wrapped up in one another, as was this family of boy and girls, "and one dear mother," Polly added.
Gretta was to go with Bob to the office door, her strong shoulder, strengthened by hay-making and gardening, was the most reliable in case Bob's foot proved weak and played him false. The girls all hovered around seeing them start, till Bob laughed at their anxious faces. "You'd think I was valuable bric-à-brac!" he cried, bursting in on Margery's grandmotherly injunctions to watch for stray bits of ice on the sidewalk, and to be sure the car was stopped before he left it.
"The man of the house is more than bric-à-brac," said Happie.
"Man! He isn't seventeen!" cried Laura.
"Just as much a man as this is a house," retorted Happie. And they all laughed, for the beloved little Patty-Pans flat was small, and nobody could deny it was crowded.
Happie was glad to get back to the tea room. It was a busy day, but she flew to and fro enjoying the rush. She was tempted to sing as she poured tea like a rosy American goddess of plenty. Mrs. Jones-Dexter came in and vouchsafed a smile of cordial welcome to Happie, though Margery had been her favorite since her increased acquaintance with the girls. Hans Lieder came too, and Happie was surprised to find herself rather glad to see the mysterious man who had once made her pity him.
"We missed you, little Miss Sonnenschein," he said. "You are such different young sisters that each leaves her own place vacant when she goes. You are the one to do and to be, the warmth and dependence; the oldest one is the sweetness, the soul of you, and the third, ah, she is gifted; she is little Clara Schumann! I wish that I could spirit her to Germany, there to be made what she was meant to be."
Happy felt alarmed. There was something about the great cloak and drooping hat of this mysterious Herr Lieder which gave her the feeling that he might bewitch Laura into Germany, and she more than half disliked his interest in their sentimental girl.
"Oh, that is kind, of course," she said hastily. "But Laura could never go away from mother; she needs mother most of all of us."
"Natürlich, being the genius," said Hans Lieder, with a laugh. "How funny it is to see your dislike to her genius! My good little Sonnenschein, your sister is not made for the safe homelife, and whether it is better or worse for her you cannot help it. She will find her way to her place in the world, mark me."
"Well," sighed Happie with a resigned philosophy, "if it is her place truly, it must be the best place for her."
Gretta came in at that moment; she had left Bob undamaged at Mr. Felton's door, had done a few errands, and came in bright and shining from the cold wind, and with pride in her new ability to thread the bewildering streets and shops of New York alone. Margery was staying at home until afternoon, when she would bring Polly and Penny to Mrs. Stewart.
"A little music, Clara Schumann?" hinted Herr Lieder to Laura, passing him. Laura shook her head.
"Not mine," she said. "I've got to help the girls. If you would——" She stopped, hesitating to ask for his wonderful playing during the hour when his audience would surely be large.
But to-day the mood for music was upon this strange man, and he nodded to Laura and went to the piano. Mrs. Jones-Dexter, who had lingered, forgot her original objection to music with her tea, and sat listening with tears streaming down her face, a face lined by her seventy years of hard battling with everything and everybody in her world; which came to mean, after all, but one thing: perpetual strife with herself.
Gradually the tea room filled. Those who came did not go away, and more and more kept coming, and still Herr Lieder played, forgetful of time, place, human beings, everything but his music. It seemed to Happie that he had not played before, when they had thought he played perfectly, as he played this day. Laura was entirely useless; the music made her hopeless as an assistant, and Happie and Gretta were at their wits' ends. There was an hour lacking to the time when Margery was due, the room was crowded, and they were hardly better fitted than Laura to look after their guests, with Herr Lieder playing as Orpheus must have played to call back the soul of Eurydice.
Happie looked about her wildly, and there in the doorway stood the tall young man, the hero of her adventure in Mr. Felton's office the day before.
He bowed and smiled as they recognized each other, looking much less surprised than she as he made his way forward and said: "Very glad to see you again. You seem to be an all around genius. Are you one of the six maidens of the card in the window?"
"Yes, I am the second of the six, I suppose," said Happie. "I hope you are well?"
The young man laughed. Plainly she had not meant to say that, and was quite demoralized by her responsibilities.
"Perfectly well, thank you, Miss Happie Scollard," he said, and Happy was too confused to wonder at his knowledge of her name. "You have marvelous music for your tea room."
"It doesn't belong to it," said Happie. "That is a mysterious German gentleman who comes here a great deal and has played for us once before. I never heard such playing. But I don't know what to do. Nobody goes, Laura—my sister—is delirious from it, and can't help us, and people keep on coming——" Happie broke off with a gesture that came near ignoring the little tray with its burden of teacups which she held.
The tall young man took it from her. "Allow me," he said as coolly as if they had been at a party and he was offering to bring her cream. "Now if you will tell me where you want these I will get them there. And you may as well let me help you. I am sure I can serve tea quite as well as you girls do. I have often served harder things than tea—tennis balls, for instance."
His brown eyes laughed into Happie's lighter brown ones so merrily and with such friendly confidence that she would accept his offer, that she yielded up her tray involuntarily with but a feeble protest.
"Oh, how can I? I don't even——"
"Know me," the stranger finished for her. "Let me help you, nevertheless. I assure you, upon my word and honor, that it is all right. If you will let me help you, before the afternoon is over you will know me well, and I hope you will know me all your life."
"That sounds more mysterious than Herr Lieder," said Happie with a frank laugh. There was something about this young man that carried conviction with whatever he said or did. He was so unmistakably well-bred, so simple, frank and honest that no one could doubt him.
Laura aroused herself from her musical delirium to stare open-eyed and open-mouthed at the spectacle, which at the same time nearly cost a pale woman a bath of hot tea at the hands of Gretta, who also saw it suddenly to her total undoing. It was that of a tall and very elegant young man gravely making his way through the crowded room, bearing tea, in Happie's wake, to the various little tables, while Happie supplemented him with more tea and little cakes, looking immensely relieved and quite as though there were nothing unusual in the situation.
"My goodness! Who is he? What can it mean?" whispered Laura to Gretta, who shook her head so hard that the end of her braid of hair slipped out of its confining bow, as she offered to an indignant customer a slice of lemon that had already been used. Margery came in at the door and stopped short, amazed to find the room so full. As she stood there, flushed and lovely, Polly and Penny in either hand, her eyes fell on Happie's assistant, and the color rushed up to her hair, while eyes and lips smiled radiantly. "Why, Mr. Gaston, what are you doing, and how did you find us?" she said, to Happie's consternation, as the tall young man dashed towards her.