She would make tea, she loved to, in fact she seemed bent upon luring Augustus away from the fire and Mrs. Pennington.  This young gentleman, whose mental processes were not rapid, and who habitually overworked any idea that found lodgment in his mind, was disposed to dwell upon River Bend Park and Miss Bentley’s strange mistake in thinking she had seen him there, when actually, don’t you know, he was on his way to New York.  It was just as well not to have the situation complicated by the presence of her more alert relative, whose amused glances kept the glow on Margaret Elizabeth’s cheek at a most becoming pitch.  Perhaps, too, the subconscious thinking concerning that same queer mistake, which went on while she chatted so gaily, so skilfully leading the way to safer ground, had something to do with it.

Augustus, unaware that he was led, was as clay in her hands.  He warmed to her expressions of pleasure in the proposed dinner dance, which were indeed entirely genuine.  A dance was a dance, and Miss Bentley was young.  As she poured tea her curling lashes rested now on her cheek, were now lifted in smiling glances at the complacent Augustus, much as when on a certain Sunday morning, while softly laying bloom against bloom, her eyes had now and again met the eyes of the Candy Man.  There were other callers, other tea drinkers, but to none did Mr. McAllister surrender his place of vantage.

“If she keeps on like this, Augustus is hers—­if she wants him,” Mr. Gerrard Pennington remarked to his wife later in the evening.

“If I could have her all to myself,” Mrs. Pennington sighed; “but any impression I may make is neutralised by her association with those Vandegrifts.  It is an absurd arrangement, spending half her time down there.”

“I think you are rather in the lead, aren’t you, my dear?”

Mrs. Pennington shrugged her shoulders, but there was some triumph in her smile.  “She is a dear child, in spite of some absurd notions, and I long to see her well and safely settled.  I don’t quite know in what her charm most lies, but she has it.”

“Oh, it’s her youth, and the conviction that it is all so jolly well worth while.  She is so keen about everything.”  There was an odd twinkle in Mr. Pennington’s eyes, usually so piercing beneath their bushy grey brows.  Margaret Elizabeth called him Uncle Gerry.  It was amusing.  He liked it, and enjoyed playing the part of Uncle Gerry.  “Of course she’s bound to get over that.  Still, I shouldn’t be in any haste to settle her.”

His wife thought of her brother, the Professor of Archaeology, now in the Far East.  “It is queer, but Dick never has,” she said, answering the first part of his sentence.  But when she spoke again, it was to say energetically:  “The Towers needs a mistress, and August is irreproachable.  Really, I am devoted to the boy.”

Mr. Pennington found this amusing.

“If only it were a colonial house.  It is handsome, but I prefer simpler lines,” Mrs. Pennington continued meditatively.