The moment was as dramatic as if the situation had been planned for the effect, since there were few present to whose minds did not leap to the picture of that other girl who had come bounding down the stairs, grotesque of dress and as assured and joyous in her ignorance as a frisky colt.
In a continued silence which no one seemed to have the temerity or the presence of mind to break, the Sheep Queen turned at the foot of the stairway, and the various groups separated on a common impulse to let her pass. She went straight to Prentiss, whose greeting was a smile of adoring tenderness.
"Am I late, father?"
The sharp intake of breath throughout the room might have come from one pair of lungs. "Father!" The rumor was true then! Amazement came first, and then uneasiness. What effect would the relationship have upon their personal interests? Had she any feeling which would lead her to use her influence to their detriment?
Kate and her father would have had more than their share of attention anywhere, for they had the same distinction of carriage, the same grave repose. Either one of them would have stood out in a far more brilliant assembly than that gathered in the Prouty House.
The social training Mrs. Abram Pantin had received at church functions in Keokuk now came to her rescue. Gathering herself, she was able to chirp: "This is a surprise!"
"You know my daughter, of course?" to Mrs. Sudds, whose jaw had dropped, so that she stood slightly open-mouthed, arrayed in a frock made in the fashion of the Moyen age and recently handed down from a great-uncle's relict who had passed on. Since this confection bulged where it should have clung and clung where it should have bulged, it was the general impression that Mrs. Sudds was out in a maternity gown. Mrs. Neifkins in fourteen gores stood beside Mrs. Toomey in a hobble skirt reminiscent of her Chicago trip, while a faint odor of moth balls, cedar chips and gasolene permeated the atmosphere in the immediate vicinity of all this ancient elegance.
"We all have met," Kate replied, and her glance included the group. While there was no emphasis to suggest that the sentence contained any special significance, yet each of the ladies was conscious of an uncomfortable warmth, and the wish that dinner would be announced was so unanimous that their heads turned simultaneously towards the dining room; and, quite as if the concentrated thought had produced the result, the proprietor of the Prouty House conveyed the information to Sudds in a whisper from the corner of his mouth that all was in readiness.