Part 45

A motherly woman asked him to wait a moment and she mixed for him a glass of lemonade. That gave him an opportunity to say a few words to her about drinking-water, modestly and deferentially. She was interested, and he showed her what the guilty faucet of her tap held in concealment.

And he saw that she was shocked and after he had warned her he asked her to tell all the other women whom she knew. She promised to bring the matter up in her sewing-club.

“And even the fussy women,” he told himself, as he plodded back to his cart, encouraged by his first experiment, “if I keep calm, if I keep smiling--I shall find my chance to say something to them after a time.”

A fresh doughnut was given to him by a maid who smiled up at his manly good looks approvingly, and he was very grateful, for his breakfast had been a meager one because he had barely enough small coins to make a jingle in his pocket.

The maid gasped affrightedly when he showed her what was in the faucet, and immediately set on water to boil to supply the bottles in the ice-chest.

Furthermore, the maid stated that she knew many other maids who would be glad to know about such a dreadful thing, and that she would have a word to say to them on the way to Sunday mass and back.

Farr began to understand more clearly what can be accomplished by a lone voice, carrying a gospel which can be backed and illustrated by signs and wonders.

“I'll have them listening to me yet,” he pondered. “I'll never say another unkind word about a woman's tongue.”

Colonel Symonds Dodd flashed past the ice-cart that afternoon in his limousine.

Farr laughed aloud at the humor of a thought which occurred to him: he reflected that he would like to behold Colonel Dodd's face and hear Colonel Dodd's remarks if somebody told that gentleman that the man before whom he had quailed and grown pale was now starting what the man believed was a more effective assault on the dynasty than even a whole car-load of dynamite bombs could make, even if they were exploded in all the Consolidated reservoirs. The remarks which would entertain, so Farr pondered, would come when the colonel was informed that the assault consisted of a lone iceman making talk to women in kitchens.

“However,” said the iceman to himself, as he checked a nick in a ten-cent cube at the back of his cart. “I hold that my new motto is all right, and old Etienne will indorse it, and he knows what self-sacrifice consists of. It isn't rolling up your eyes and folding your hands and saying, 'What can I do?' It's saying, 'I'll do what I can!'--and then keeping your hands busy!”

WHEN A MAID IS COY

Mr. Richard Dodd came wooing.

He waited in his gray car at the curb in front of the First National Bank block until Kate Kilgour issued forth into the afternoon sunshine.

He called to her, holding open the side door.

“I just had to see you,” he told her. “I have come down from the capital, doing forty miles an hour. You're more precious than all the money I have locked up in the vaults.”

He did not find in her eyes any of that acclaimed glad love-light which eager lovers seek. On the contrary, Miss Kilgour made just a bit of a face at him and was distinctly petulant.

“I do not want to ride, Richard. I enjoy my walk. I need it after a day at my desk.”

“But I'm going to take you on a long ride into the country. We'll have dinner at Hillcrest Inn and we'll--”

“I'll go straight home, if you please.”

“Then come in here with me.”

“Oh, if you insist!” She said it with weary impatience.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

He drove slowly. “I don't want you to work any more. You know I don't. You know how I feel. Kate, I have published our intentions of marriage.”

Her demeanor till then had been marked by tolerance, a bit pettish. Now she turned on him the indignant stare of offended womanhood.

“Richard, I have not given you permission to do that.”

“But you are going to marry me!”