The Prodigal Father Part 12

"Hullo!" smiled the widow archly.

He had felt ashamed of the exclamation the moment it escaped him, but finding it received so prettily, he secretly resolved to say it again some day--after a week or two had elapsed, perhaps; confining himself to more dignified remarks in the interval.

"You look as though you had heard good news," said Mrs. Dunbar.

"I've been chasing my hat," he chuckled.

He had meant to make no allusion to the undignified episode, and here he was blurting it out first thing! He began to feel puzzled by this odd persistence of high spirits.

"Not in the street, surely?" said Miss Walkingshaw, with her longest face.

"Oh, I hope it was in the street!" cried the widow. "I'd have loved to see you!"

Her dear friend regarded this speech with the strongest disapproval; in fact, she had never quite approved of Madge since those unlucky words of hers. But Mrs. Dunbar had ceased for some reason to show the same marked regard for her opinion. It was Heriot who had again refused to hear of her leaving, and she seemed content to win his approval.

"It was in the street," smiled Mr. Walkingshaw. "I chased it for quite half a mile, and ran it down single-handed. I wish you had been there, Madge. You'd have seen there was life in the old dog still!"

He had doubled the distance and forgotten the lady with the umbrella; but then, as Andrew had remarked, a distaste for dry detail had suddenly become characteristic of his recovered health.

"Too much life sometimes, I think!" she exclaimed coquettishly; and Mr.

Walkingshaw winked in reply.

He was inwardly as surprised at the wink as he had been at the "hullo."

These aberrations seemed to come quite spontaneously. He wished he could understand what caused them.

"Have you had a tiring day at the office?" asked the dry Scotch voice of his sister.

Her familiar accents instinctively banished the aberrations.

"Tolerably, tolerably," he said, with his old air. "We had the affairs of Guthrie and Co. to settle up. I settled them, though."

"Andrew would be a great help," she replied, with an apprehensive glance at him. She was much in her nephew's confidence at present.

"Andrew, pooh!" said his father. "He'd talk the hind leg off an elephant. When things need settling, I just settle them myself and leave him to grumble away to Thomieson."

Miss Walkingshaw gasped, and the widow gave the sweetest little laugh.

"Poor Andrew!" said she.

"Poor Andrew indeed," retorted her friend, with more indignation than she had almost ever permitted herself in the presence of her formidable brother.

He looked at her in genuine surprise. So subtly had his point of view altered that he quite failed to grasp her cause of complaint.

"What's the matter, Mary?" he asked.

"Oh, if you don't see, what's the good in my trying to explain?"

He merely stared at her, and the widow tactfully interposed.

"Of course you are going to the match on Sat.u.r.day?" said she.

"Of course, Madge."

"Have you forgotten Mr. Berstoun is coming to see you?" asked Miss Walkingshaw.

He waved aside this objection with a dignified sweep of his hand. A piece of cake happened to be in it, and the icing flew across the floor.

On the instant he was on his hands and knees collecting it.

"Berstoun's a mere nuisance," he answered from the carpet. "He'll never get out of debt if he lives to a thousand. What's the good in his coming to see me? Let him tell his creditors to go to the devil; that's the only sensible thing to do."

He rose chuckling--

"He'll go himself some day; so they'll meet again."

His sister's face was too much for the widow's gravity. She began to laugh hysterically, her black eyes dancing all the time in the merriest fashion at her host. It was so infectious that in a moment he had joined her.

"Won't they?" he kept asking through his chuckles. "Won't they, Madge?"

She kept nodding, choked with laughter, and another strange sensation began to puzzle Mr. Walkingshaw. It was not so much something new as something forgotten which was beginning to return, and it concerned this very sympathetic widow. She was an uncommonly nice woman--really uncommonly: and what an odd pleasure he began to feel in her society! He felt even more satisfaction than when he had run down his hat.

CHAPTER III

It was upon a fine April morning that Mr. Walkingshaw made his momentous discovery. His sister had left her room on her way to breakfast when she heard his voice calling her. It had so curious a note of excitement that she got a little fl.u.s.tered. Whatever could be the matter? She hurried to his dressing-room door and tapped with a trembling hand. She was not easily agitated as a rule, but her brother had been very disconcerting for the past few weeks, and now his voice was odd. She remembered reading of gentlemen lying on their dressing-room floors with razors in their hands--

"Come in!" he cried impatiently.

She found him dressed all but his coat, and he was standing by the window looking out over the street and the circular garden.

"Come here, Mary," he said, and pointed at the houses seen through the leafless trees. "Have they been doing anything to the Hendersons'

house?"

"What doing to it?" she exclaimed.

"Painting it, or brightening it, or--or anything of that kind?"

"Who ever heard of painting a house!"

From which it may be gathered that the good lady was not in the habit of visiting other cities.

"Well then, washing it?"

"Mr. Henderson washing his house! Whatever would he do that for?"

"Tuts, tuts," said her brother, "I'm only asking you. It looks so uncommonly distinct. Can you not count the chimney-cans?"