Flood Tide Part 21

"I'm not so certain," laughed the elder woman lightly. "You know she is tremendously strong in her likes and dislikes. All the Lees are.

We're a headstrong family where our affections are concerned. You, Bob, are the apple of her eye."

"She has always been mighty kind to me," the young man affirmed soberly. "I never saw my own grandmothers; both of them died before I came into the world. So, you see, if it were not for borrowing Roger's and Cynthia's, I should be quite bereft."

The party rose and moved through the cool hall into the dining room.

A delicious luncheon, perfectly served by a velvet-footed maid and the old colored butler, followed, and there was a great deal of conversation, a great deal of reminiscing and a great deal of laughter.

Cynthia complained that the claret cup was too sweet and that the ices were not frozen enough and had much to say of the ice cream at Maillard's.

"But you are far from Maillard's now, my dear," her mother remarked, "and you must make the best of things."

"Being on Cape Cod you are almighty lucky to get any ice cream at all,"

announced Roger with brotherly zest.

"Roger, why will you tease your sister so? You hector Cynthia every moment you are in the house."

"Oh, she knows I don't mean it," grinned Roger. "I just have to take the starch out of her now and then, don't I, Cynthia Ann?"

"Roger!" fretted his sister. "I wish you wouldn't call me Cynthia _Ann_! I can't imagine why you've taken to doing so lately."

"Chiefly because you do not like it, my dear," was the retort. "If I were not so sure of getting a rise out of you every time, perhaps I might be tempted to stop."

"You children quarrel like a pair of apes," Mr. Galbraith said. "If I did not know that underneath you were perfectly devoted to each other, I should be worried to death about you."

"You needn't waste any worry on Cynthia Ann and me, Dad," Roger declared. "Bad as she is, she's the best sister I've got, and I rather like her in spite of her faults."

A smile pa.s.sed between the two.

"You've some faults of your own, remember," observed the girl, with a grimace.

"Not a one, mademoiselle, not a one! I swear it," was the instant retort. "Coming into the family first, I picked the cream of the Lee and Galbraith qualities and gave you what was left."

"I command you two to stop your bickering," Mr. Galbraith said at last.

"You are wasting the whole luncheon, squabbling. You'd much better be deciding what you are going to do with Bob for the rest of the day."

"I thought I'd take him out in the knockabout," Roger suggested. "That is, if he would like to go. The tide will be just right and there is a fine breeze."

"You may take him if you will get him home at tea time," Mrs. Galbraith said. "Your grandmother has set her heart on seeing him this afternoon and you know she retires soon after dinner."

"You wouldn't have any time to sail at all, Roger," put in Cynthia.

"Especially if you should get stuck on a bar as you did the other day."

"We should have two hours."

"Why don't you take the launch, Roger?" his mother inquired.

"And get snagged in the eel gra.s.s--not on your life!"

"Bob and Mr. Spence are going to do away with all that eel gra.s.s, you know," called his father, sauntering out of doors.

"I'll wait until they do, then," was the grim retort.

"I should think Bob would a great deal rather go for a motor-ride,"

Cynthia ventured, her eyes fixed impersonally on the landscape.

"I suppose you'd like to cart him off in your car."

"It doesn't make any difference whose car he goes in, does it?"

"Well, ra--_ther_! If he goes in yours there's no room for me; if he goes in mine there is no room for you. That's the difference."

"Children, do stop tearing Bob to fragments," lisped Mrs. Galbraith with some amus.e.m.e.nt. "If you keep on pulling him to pieces he won't go anywhere. Now Roger, you take Bob sailing and have a good visit with him, and bring him back so he can have tea with your grandmother at five; this evening the rest of us will have our chance to see him."

She did not look at Cynthia, but with a woman's forethought she remembered that the verandas were roomy and that the moon was full soon after dinner. Cynthia remembered it too and smiled.

"Yes, go ahead, Roger," she called. "Take Bob round the bay. It is a lovely sail and as he hasn't been here before he will enjoy it."

It was only a little past five when the two young men returned, a glow of health and pleasure on their faces.

"Now, Bobbie, do make haste," Mrs. Galbraith said, coming to meet him.

"Mother's tea has already gone up, and you know how she detests waiting. Her maid is there in the hall to show you the way. Hurry along, dear boy."

Robert Morton needed no second bidding and at once followed the middle-aged English woman up the staircase and into a small, chintz-hung sitting room that looked out on the sea.

At the farther end of it, seated before a low tea table, was a stately, white-haired lady, very erect, very handsome and very elegantly dressed in a gown of soft black material. At the neck, which was turned away, she wore a fichu of filmy lace tinted by time to a creamy tone and held in place by an old-fashioned medallion of seed pearls. White ruffles at the wrists drooped over her delicately veined hands and showed only the occasional flash of a ring and her perfectly manicured finger tips.

Summer or winter, fair weather or foul, Madam Lee never varied this costume, and it seemed to possess some measure of its owner's eternal youth, for it was always fresh and its l.u.s.trous folds always swept the ground in the same dignified fashion. Indeed for those who knew Madam Lee to think of her in any other guise would have been impossible. Her silvered hair was parted and rippled over her forehead to her ears where it was slightly puffed and caught back with combs of sh.e.l.l, and from beneath it two little black eyes peered out with a bird's alertness of gaze. Although age had claimed her strength, it was evident from the woman's vivacious expression that she had lost none of her interest in life and as she now sat before the silver-laden tea table there was a girlish antic.i.p.ation in her eager pose.

"Ah, you scamp!" cried she, when she heard her visitor's footstep in the upper hall, "I have been waiting for you a full five minutes. I don't wait for every one, I would have you know. Come here and give an account of yourself."

The young man bent and softly touched her cheek with his lips.

She put out her hand and let it linger affectionately in his as he dropped into the chair beside her.

"I can't begin to tell you how glad I am to see you, Bob," she went on, in a voice soft and exquisitely modulated. "We had no idea you were on the Cape. But for that jeweler's stupidity we should have thought you had gone west long ago. Considering what good friends you and Roger are, you are the worst of correspondents; and you never write to me."

"I know it," owned Robert Morton with disarming honesty. "It's beastly of me."

"No, dear. On the contrary it is very like a man," contradicted Madam Lee with a pretty little laugh. "However, I am not going to scold you about it now. I have seen too many men in my day. First let me pour your tea. Then you shall tell me all that you have been doing. I hear you are visiting a new aunt whom you have just unearthed."

"Yes."

"How do you like her?"

Bob chuckled at the characteristic directness of the question.