"You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble
we awe giving you." He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray,
trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray
eyes. His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect of
liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled, rather
formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary verbs,
and its total elision of the canine letter.
"We awe from the Soath," she said, "and we arrived this mawning, but we
got this cyahd from the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah
late."
"Not at all; it's only nine o'clock," said Mrs. Leighton. She looked up
from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, "We haven't
got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and--"
"You were frightened, of coase," said the young lady, caressingly.
The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered
some formal apologies.
"We should have been just as much scared any time after five o'clock,"
Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl's face.
She laughed out. "Of coase! Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day
long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone.
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