Fancy laughing until you cried, and the servants looking on!
Though once Burrill himself was obliged to turn hastily away, and twice she heard him severely reprove an overpowered young footman in a rapid undertone.
Tembarom at least felt that the unlifting heaviness of atmosphere which had surrounded him while enjoying the companionship of Mr. Palford was a thing of the past.
The thrilled interest, the surprise and delight, of Miss Alicia would have stimulated a man in a comatose condition, it seemed to him.
The little thing just loved every bit of it--she just “eat it up.” She asked question after question, sometimes questions which would have made him shout with laughter if he had not been afraid of hurting her feelings. She knew as little of New York as he knew of Temple Barholm, and was, it made him grin to see, allured by it as by some illicit fascination.
She did not know what to make of it, and sometimes she was obliged hastily to conceal a fear that it was a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah; but she wanted to hear more about it, and still more.
And she brightened up until she actually did not look frightened, and ate her dinner with an excellent appetite.
“I really never enjoyed a dinner so much in my life,” she said when they went into the drawing-room to have their coffee. “It was the conversation which made it so delightful. Conversation is such a stimulating thing!”
She had almost decided that it was “conversation,” or at least a wonderful substitute.
When she said good night to him and went beaming to bed, looking forward immensely to breakfast next morning, he watched her go up the staircase, feeling wonderfully normal and happy.
“Some of these nights, when she’s used to me,” he said as he stuffed tobacco into his last pipe in the library--“some of these nights I’m darned if I sha’n’t catch hold of the sweet, little old thing and hug her in spite of myself. I sha’n’t be able to help it.” He lit his pipe, and puffed it even excitedly. “Lord!” he said, “there’s some blame’ fool going about the world right now that might have married her. And he’ll never know what a break he made when he didn’t.”
A fugitive fine day which had strayed into the month from the approaching spring appeared the next morning, and Miss Alicia was uplifted by the enrapturing suggestion that she should join her new relative in taking a walk, in fact that it should be she who took him to walk and showed him some of his possessions. This, it had revealed itself to him, she could do in a special way of her own, because during her life at Temple Barholm she had felt it her duty to “try to do a little good” among the villagers. She and her long-dead mother and sister had of course been working adjuncts of the vicarage, and had numerous somewhat trying tasks to perform in the way of improving upon “dear papa’s” harrying them into attending church, chivying, the mothers into sending their children to Sunday-school, and being unsparing in severity of any conduct which might be construed into implying lack of appreciation of the vicar or respect for his eloquence.