great-hearted wizard-of-pathos-and-humor’s Alpha of “Boz” to his unfinished Omega of “Edwin Drood”—Bransby’s book of the moment was “David Copperfield.” He had been reading a passage that appealed to him particularly when he had been interrupted by Grant’s intrusion. That had not served to soften the acerbity of the employer’s “Preposterous!”

“And what have you been doing?” Richard asked the dainty bundle on his knee.

“Playing.”

“With your cousins?”

She shook an emphatic head, and her curls glowed redder, more golden in the red and gold of the fire’s reflection. “Wiv Gertrude.”

Mrs. Leavitt stirred uncomfortably. But the father laughed tolerantly. He regarded all his daughter’s vagaries (she had several) as part of the fun of the fair, and quite charming. She rarely could be led to speak of her “make-believe” playmates, but he knew that they all had names and individualities, and that “Gertrude” was first favorite. And he knew that many children played so with mates of their own spirit’s finding. Gertrude seemed a virtuous, well-behaved young person, quite a suitable acquaintance for his fastidious daughter.

Servants carried high-tea in just then, and Stephen slipped into the room with it.

Caroline Leavitt rolled up her crocheting disapprovingly. She detested having food carried all over the house and devoured in inappropriate places, and she disliked high-tea. Crumbs got on the Persian carpet and cream on the carved chairs, and once, when the hybrid refection had been served in the drawing-room, jam had encrusted the piano. Caroline had gained a prize for “piano proficiency” in her girlhood’s long-ago. Every day at four-fifteen it was her habit to commemorate that old victory by playing at least a few bars of the Moonlight Sonata. For some time after the episode of the jam, whenever she touched the instrument’s ivory, small bubbles of thickly boiled blackberry and apple billowed up on to her manicured nails and her rings. No—she did not approve of “high-tea”—and such high-tea “all over the house.” But this was the children’s hour at Deep Dale, and the children’s feast—and wherever Helen chanced to be at that hour, there that meal was served. Helen willed it so. Richard Bransby willed it so. Against such an adamant combine of power and of will-force determined and arrogant, Caroline knew herself a mere nothing, and she wisely withheld a protest she realized hopeless.

such

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