“Ham!” she exclaimed tensely, though even now she spoke in a cautious voice so that no echo might reach other ears.  “Put me down!  How dare you?”

He did not answer the question; instead he asked another.

“Will you enter as mistress of the house or will you go in kicking?”

During a long defiant pause, their eyes held, both pairs unwavering; then the girl said quietly:  “I’ll go in myself.”

CHAPTER VI

Harrow had not overstated the facts when he said that it had been his privilege to serve in families “where niceties were highly regarded.”  He was the accomplished servant, seeing and hearing only such things as his betters intended for his eyes and ears.  If he had human emotions he ordinarily revealed them only when his livery was doffed.  Yet even the impeccably correct serving man has his moments of weakness, and, as Hamilton Burton left the room, he muttered low, but quite audibly, “My God!” Then, feeling Carl Bristoll’s chilling glance upon him, he sought to cover his indiscretion in an apologetic cough.

But the secretary himself felt the disturbing uneasiness that had prompted that exclamation.  Hamilton Burton had been defied, and when that occurred peace fled and punishment fell.

Evidently the girl upstairs, the girl just returned from years of study and travel in Europe, had something of that same spirit which made her brother’s will a thing of adamant, but she had not done well to begin her new life by measuring lances with the autocratic Hamilton.  Probably at the moment she was being reprimanded, perhaps rebuked into tears which, since she was young and beautiful, became a disquieting thought.  Carl Bristoll felt the discomfort of the outsider in the shadow of a family scene.

He would now have to meet Mary Burton under the most inauspicious circumstances, and she would always remember that he had first seen her with tear-stained eyes at a moment of humiliation and defeat.  It was too much to expect that a woman could forget this, and the young secretary had the wish that it should be otherwise.  So he sat rather moodily contemplating his plate and when he heard steps on the stairs he was surprised at the brevity of the interval.  Hamilton Burton had evidently subdued this insurrection in his household with the same whirlwind swiftness that he employed toward enemies beyond his walls.

Bristoll saw the young financier draw back the portieres and he himself rose hastily and came forward, but he halted half-way and stood transfixed.  He had been told that he was to expect beauty, and he had expected it, yet now for the moment he found himself standing astonished, and as devoid as a raw schoolboy of his usually imperturbable poise.  From this trance-like condition he was recalled by the quizzical amusement of his employer and, bowing from the hips, he found himself murmuring some well-bred inanity.