But by some miracle this disaster—if you could call it that—did not occur. For quite a considerable time the sufferer had trouble with her vocal chords and could emit nothing but guttural croaks. Then, mastering herself with a strong effort, she spoke.
“What did you say?”
“You heard,” said Sigsbee H. sullenly, twisting his fingers and wishing that he was out in Utah, rustling cattle.
Mrs. Waddington moistened her lips.
“Did you. I understand you to say that Molly was engaged to be married to that Finch?”
“Yes, I did. And,” added Sigsbee H., giving battle in the first line of trenches, “it’s no good saying it was all my fault, because I had nothing to do with it.”
“It was you who brought this man into the house.”
“Well, yes.” Sigsbee had overlooked that weak spot in his defences. “Well, yes.”
There came upon Mrs. Waddington a ghastly calm like that which comes upon the surface of molten lava in the crater of a volcano just before the stuff shoots out and starts doing the local villagers a bit of no good.
“Ring the bell,” she said.
Sigsbee H. rang the bell.
“Ferris,” said Mrs. Waddington, “ask Miss Molly to come here.”
“Very good, madam.”
In the interval which elapsed between the departure of the butler and the arrival of the erring daughter, no conversation brilliant enough to be worth reporting took place in the room. Once Sigsbee said “Er—” and in reply Mrs. Waddington said “Be quiet!” but that completed the dialogue. When Molly entered, Mrs. Waddington was looking straight in front of her and heaving gently, and Sigsbee H. had just succeeded in breaking a valuable china figure which he had taken from an occasional table and was trying in a preoccupied manner to balance on the end of a paper-knife.
“Ferris says you want to see me, mother,” said Molly, floating brightly in.
She stood there, looking at the two with shining eyes. Her cheeks were delightfully flushed: and there was about her so radiant an air of sweet, innocent, girlish gaiety that it was all Mrs. Waddington could do to refrain from hurling a bust of Edgar Allan Poe at her head.
“I do want to see you,” said Mrs. Waddington. “Pray tell me instantly what is all this nonsense I hear about you and. …” She choked. “… and Mr. Finch.”
“To settle a bet,” said Sigsbee H., “is his name Finch or Pinch?”
“Finch, of course.”
“I’m bad at names,” said Sigsbee. “I was in college with a fellow called Follansbee and do you think I could get it out of my nut that that guy’s name was Ferguson? Not in a million years! I. …”
“Sigsbee!”
“Hello?”
“Be quiet.” Mrs. Waddington concentrated her attention on Molly once more. “Your father says that you told him some absurd story about being. …”
“Engaged to George?” said Molly. “Yes, it’s quite true. I am. By a most extraordinary chance we met this afternoon in Central Park near the Zoo. …”
“A place,” said Sigsbee H., “I’ve meant to go to a hundred times and never seen yet.”
“Sigsbee!”
“All right, all right! I was only saying. …”
“We were both tremendously surprised, of course,” said Molly. “I said ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ and he said. …”
“I have no wish to hear what Mr. Finch said.”
“Well, anyway, we walked round for awhile, looking at the animals, and suddenly he asked me to marry him outside the cage of the Siberian yak.”
“No, sir!” exclaimed Sigsbee H. with a sudden strange firmness, the indulgent father who for once in his life asserts himself. “When you get married, you’ll be married in St. Thomas’s like any other nice girl.”
“I mean it was outside the cage of the Siberian yak that he asked me to marry him.”
“Oh, ah!” said Sigsbee H.
A dreamy look had crept into Molly’s eyes. Her lips were curved in a tender smile, as if she were reliving that wonderful moment in a girl’s life, when the man she loves beckons to her to follow him into Paradise.
“You ought to have seen his ears!” she said. “They were absolutely crimson.”
“You don’t say!” chuckled Sigsbee H.
“Scarlet! And, when he tried to speak, he gargled.”
“The poor simp!”
Molly turned on her father with flaming eyes.
“How dare you call my dear darling Georgie a simp?”
“How dare you call that simp your dear darling Georgie?” demanded Mrs. Waddington.
“Because he is my dear darling Georgie. I love him with all my heart, the precious lamb, and I’m going to marry him.”
“You are going to do nothing of the kind!” Mrs. Waddington quivered with outraged indignation. “Do you imagine I intend to allow you to ruin your life by marrying a despicable fortune-hunter?”
“He isn’t a despicable fortune-hunter.”
“He is a penniless artist.”
“Well, I’m sure he is frightfully clever and will be able to sell his pictures forever so much.”
“Tchah!”
“Besides,” said Molly defiantly, “when I marry I get that pearl necklace which father gave mother. I can sell that, and it will keep us going for years.”
Mrs. Waddington was about to reply—and there is little reason to doubt that that reply would have been about as red-hot a comeback as any hundred and eighty pound woman had ever spoken—when she was checked by a sudden exclamation of agony that proceeded from the lips of her husband.
“Whatever is the matter, Sigsbee?” she said, annoyed.
Sigsbee H. seemed to be wrestling with acute mental agitation. He was
