"Oh, isn't this the right implement?" queried Mr. Brown, contemplating his spoon. "Well, if you ask ME, I'm glad you started off with it--this soupy stuff'd be the mischief to get away with with a fork."

Archibald Chesney wouldn't have talked that way. But, nevertheless, Missy let her eyelids lift up at him in a smile.

"I'm glad you didn't know it was a mistake," she murmured. "I was TERRIBLY mortified."

"Girls are funny," Mr. Brown replied to that. "Always worrying over nothing." He returned her smile. "But YOU needn't ever worry."

What did he mean by that? But something in his dark eyes, gazing at her full, kept Missy from asking the question, made her swiftly lower her lashes.

"I bet YOU could start eating with a toothpick and get away with it," he went on.

Did he mean her social savoir-faire--or did he mean--

Just then the butler appeared at her left hand to remove the c.o.c.ktail course. She felt emboldened to remark, with an air of ease:

"Oh, Saunders, don't forget to lay the spoons when you serve the demi-ta.s.ses."

Mr. Brown laughed.

"Oh, say!" he chortled, "you ARE funny when you hand out that highfalutin stuff!"

No; he surely hadn't meant admiration for her savoir-faire; yet, for some reason, Missy didn't feel disappointed. She blushed, and found it entrancingly difficult to lift her eyelids.

The function, rather stiffly and quite impressively, continued its way without further contretemps. It was, according to the most aristocratic standards, highly successful. To be sure, after the guests had filed solemnly from the table and began to dance on the porches, something of the empress.e.m.e.nt died away; but Missy was finding Mr. Brown too good a dancer to remember to be critical. She forgot altogether, now, to compare him with the admired Archibald.

Missy danced with Mr. Brown so much that Raymond Bonner grew openly sulky. Missy liked Raymond, and she was sure she would never want to do anything unkind--yet why, at the obvious ill temper of Raymond Bonner, did she feel a strange little delicious thrill?

Oh, she was having a glorious time!

Once she ran across father, lurking un.o.btrusively in a shadowed corner.

"Well," he remarked, "I see that Missy's come back for a breathing-spell."

Just what did father mean by that?

But she was having too good a time to wonder long. Too good a time to remember whether or not it was in the baronial spirit. She was entirely uncritical when, the time for good nights finally at hand, Mr. Brown said to her:

"Well, a fine time was had by all! I guess I don't have to tell YOU that--what?"

Archibald Chesney would never have put it that way. Yet Missy, with Mr.

Brown's eyes upon her in an openly admiring gaze, wouldn't have had him changed one bit.

But, when at last sleep came to her in her little white bed, on the silvery tide of the moon, it carried a dream to slip up under the tight-closed eyes...

The ball is at its height. The door of the conservatory opens and a fair young creature steals in. She is fairer than the flowers themselves as, with a pretty consciousness of her own grace, she advances into the bower. Her throat is fair and rounded under the diamonds that are no brighter than her own great grey eyes; her nut-brown locks lie in heavy ma.s.ses on her well-shaped head, while across her forehead a few rebellious tresses wantonly wander.

She suddenly sees in the shadows that other figure which has started perceptibly at her entrance; a tall and eminently gloomy figure, with hair of a rare blackness, and eyes dark and insouciant but admiring withal.

With a silken frou-frou she glides toward him, happy and radiant, for she is in her airiest mood tonight.

"Is not my dress charming, Mr. Brown?" she cries with charming naivete.

"Does it not become me?"

"It is as lovely as its wearer," replied the other, with a suppressed sigh.

"Pouf! What a simile! Who dares compare me with a paltry gown?"

Then, laughing at his discomfiture, the coquette, with slow nonchalance, gathers up her long train.

"But I'll forgive you--this once," she concedes, "for there is positively no one to take poor little me back to the ballroom."

And Lady Melissa slips her hand beneath Mr. Brown's arm, and glances up at him with laughing, friendly eyes...

CHAPTER VI. INFLUENCING ARTHUR

No one in Cherryvale ever got a word from Melissa about the true inwardness of the spiritual renaissance she experienced the winter that the Reverend MacGill came to the Methodist church; naturally not her father nor mother nor Aunt Nettie, because grown-ups, though nice and well-meaning, with their inability to "understand," and their tendency to laugh make one feel shy and reticent about the really deep and vital things. And not even Tess O'Neill, Missy's chum that year, a lively, ingenious, and wonderful girl, was in this case clever enough to obtain complete confidence.

Once before Missy had felt the flame divine--a deep, vague kind of glow all subtly mixed up with "One Sweetly Solemn Thought" and such slow, stirring, minor harmonies, and with sunlight stealing through the stained-gla.s.s window above the pulpit in colourful beauty that pierced to her very soul. But that was a long time ago, when she was a little thing--only ten. Now she was nearly sixteen. Things were different. One now was conscious of the reality of inward inexperiences: these must influence life--one's own and, haply, the lives of others. What Missy did not emphasize in her mind was the mystery of how piety evolved from white fox furs and white fox furs finally evolved from piety. But she did perceive that it would be hopeless to try to explain her motives about Arthur as mixed up with the acquisition of the white fox furs...

No; not even Tess O'Neill could have grasped the true inwardness of it all.

It all began, as nearly as one could fix on a concrete beginning, with Genevieve Hicks's receiving a set of white fox furs for Christmas. The furs were soft and silky and luxurious, and Genevieve might well have been excused for wearing them rather triumphantly. Missy wasn't at all envious by nature and she tried to be fair-minded in this case, but she couldn't help begrudging Genevieve her regal air.

Genevieve had paraded her becoming new finery past the Merriam residence on several Sunday afternoons, but this wasn't the entire crux of Missy's discontent. Genevieve and the white fox furs were escorted by Arthur Summers.

Now, Arthur had more than once asked Missy herself to "go walking" on Sunday afternoons. But Mrs. Merriam had said Missy was too young for such things. And when Missy, in reb.u.t.tal, once pointed out the promenading Genevieve, Mrs. Merriam had only replied that Genevieve's mother ought to know better--that Genevieve was a frivolous-minded girl, anyway.

Missy, peering through the parlour lace curtains, made no answer; but she thought: "Bother! Everybody can go walking but me!"

Then she thought:

"She's laughing awful loud. She is frivolous-minded."

Then:

"He looks as if he's having a good time, too; he's laughing back straight at her. I wonder if he thinks she's very pretty."

And then:

"I wish I had some white fox furs."

That evening at the supper-table Missy voiced her desire. There were just the four of them at the table--father, mother, Aunt Nettie and herself. Missy sat silent, listening to the talk of the grownups; but their voices floated to her as detached, far-off sounds, because she was engrossed in looking at a mental picture; a red-haired, laughing, admiring-eyed boy walking along beside a girl in white fox furs--and the girl was not Genevieve Hicks. The delights of the vision must have reflected in her face because finally her father said:

"Well, Missy, what's all the smiling about?"

Missy blushed as if she'd been caught in mischief; but she answered, wistfully rather than hopefully: