“Well, we must get her out of this somehow,” he said; and so they entered the shop.
Sheila knew she was guilty the moment she met her husband’s look, though she had never dreamed of it before. She had, indeed, acted quite thoughtlessly--perhaps chiefly moved by a desire to speak to some one and to befriend some one in her own loneliness.
“Hadn’t you better let this little girl go?” said Lavender to Sheila, somewhat coldly, as soon as he had ordered an ice for his companion.
“When she has finished her lemonade she will go,” said Sheila, meekly. “But I have to buy some things for her, first.”
“You have got a whole lot of people around the door,” he said.
“It is very kind of the people to wait for her,” answered Sheila, with the same composure. “We have been here half an hour. I suppose they will like her music very much.”
The little violiniste was now taken to the counter and her pockets stuffed with packages of sugared fruits and other deadly delicacies; then she was permittted to go with half a crown in her hand. Mrs. Lorraine patted her shoulder in passing, and said she was a pretty little thing.
They went home to luncheon. Nothing was said about the incident of the forenoon, except that Lavender complained to Mrs. Kavanagh in a humorous way, that his wife had a most extraordinary fondness for beggars, and that he never went home of an evening without expecting to find her dining with the nearest scavenger and his family. Lavender, indeed, was in an amiable frame of mind at the meal (during the progress of which Sheila sat by the window, of course, for she had already lunched in company with the tiny violiniste), and was bent on making himself as agreeable as possible to his two companions. Their talk had drifted toward the wanderings of the two ladies on the Continent; from that to the Niebelungen frescoes in Munich; from that to the Niebelungen itself, and then by easy transition to the ballads of Uhland and Heine. Lavender was in one of his most impulsive and brilliant moods--gay and jocular, tender and sympathetic by turns, and so obviously sincere in all that his listeners were delighted with his speeches and assertions and stories, and believed them as implicitly as he did himself.