“That’s all right. I’m Thomas McLeod. What part of the house do you work in?”
“I’m the—the second parlor maid.”
“Do you know the ‘Falling Waters’?”
“No,” said Celia, “we don’t know anybody. We got rich too quick—that is, Mr. Spraggins did.”
“I’ll make you acquainted,” said Thomas McLeod. “It’s a strathspey—a first cousin to a hornpipe.”
If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could actually whistle bass.
When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of the Charon line.
“I’ll be around to-morrow at 10:15,” said Thomas, “with some spinach and a case of carbonic.”
“I’ll practice that what-you-may-call-it,” said Celia. “I can whistle a fine second.”
The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain a description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon the province of the X-ray or of park policemen.
A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered at the end of the latticed “passage.”
