.

After a time it appeared that Sally had a suitor. She went out
occasionally with friends she had made in the work-room, and had met a
young man, an electrical engineer in a very good way of business, who was
a most eligible person. One day she told her mother that he had asked her
to marry him.

"What did you say?" said her mother.

"Oh, I told him I wasn't over-anxious to marry anyone just yet awhile."
She paused a little as was her habit between observations. "He took on so
that I said he might come to tea on Sunday."

It was an occasion that thoroughly appealed to Athelny. He rehearsed all
the afternoon how he should play the heavy father for the young man's
edification till he reduced his children to helpless giggling. Just before
he was due Athelny routed out an Egyptian tarboosh and insisted on putting
it on.

"Go on with you, Athelny," said his wife, who was in her best, which was
of black velvet, and, since she was growing stouter every year, very tight
for her. "You'll spoil the girl's chances."

She tried to pull it off, but the little man skipped nimbly out of her
way.

"Unhand me, woman. Nothing will induce me to take it off. This young man
must be shown at once that it is no ordinary family he is preparing to
enter."

"Let him keep it on, mother," said Sally, in her even, indifferent
fashion. "If Mr. Donaldson doesn't take it the way it's meant he can take
himself off, and good riddance."

Philip thought it was a severe ordeal that the young man was being exposed
to, since Athelny, in his brown velvet jacket, flowing black tie, and red
tarboosh, was a startling spectacle for an innocent electrical engineer.
When he came he was greeted by his host with the proud courtesy of a
Spanish grandee and by Mrs. Athelny in an altogether homely and natural
fashion. They sat down at the old ironing-table in the high-backed monkish
chairs, and Mrs. Athelny poured tea out of a lustre teapot which gave a
note of England and the country-side to the festivity. She had made little
cakes with her own hand, and on the table was home-made jam. It was a
farm-house tea, and to Philip very quaint and charming in that Jacobean
house. Athelny for some fantastic reason took it into his head to
discourse upon Byzantine history; he had been reading the later volumes of
the Decline and Fall; and, his forefinger dramatically extended, he
poured into the astonished ears of the suitor scandalous stories about
Theodora and Ir