Come Out of the Kitchen! A Romance

								

and matches.
"Sorry to be late," he said.
Reed, who had looked up as one who did not at once remember, in his vast
preoccupation, either his visitor or his business, now seemed to recall
everything. He waved the newcomer to a chair, with a splendid gesture.
"Doubtless the roads," he began.
"Roads!" said the other. "Mud-holes. No, we left Washington later than I
intended. Well, have you got the house for me?"
Reed offered his client a cigar.
"No, thank you, prefer my cigarette if you don't mind."
Reed did not mind in the least. The real estate business in Vestalia was
never brilliant, and several weeks' profits might easily have been
expended in one friendly smoke.
His client was a man under thirty, of a type that used to be considered
typically American--that is to say, Anglo-Saxon, modified by a century
or so of New England climate and conscience. His ancestors had been
sailors, perhaps, and years of exposure had tanned their skins and left
their eyes as blue as ever. His movements had the gentleness
characteristic of men who are much with horses, and though he was
active and rather lightly built, he never was sudden or jerky in any
gesture. Something of this same quietness might be detected in his
mental attitude. People sometimes thought him hesitating or undecided on
questions about which his mind was irrevocably made up. He took a
certain friendly interest in life as a whole, and would listen with such
patience to an expression of opinion that the expresser of it was often
surprised to find the opinion had had no weight with him, whatsoever.
He stood now, listening with the politest attention to Reed's somewhat
flowery description of the charms of the Revelly house--charms which
Crane himself had examined in the minutest detail.
"Never before," exclaimed the real estate agent, in a magnificent
peroration, "never before has the splendid mansion been rented--"
"Ah," said Crane with a smile, "I believe you there."
"Never been offered for rent," corrected the real estate agent, with a
cough. "Its delightful colonial flavor--"
"Its confounded dilapidation," said the prospective tenant.
"Its boxwood garden, its splendid lawns, its stables, accommodating
twenty-five horses--"
"Yes, if they don't lean up against the sides."
Reed frowned.
"If," he remarked with a touch of pride, "you do not want the house--"
The young man of the motor car laughed good-temperedly.
"I thought we had settled all that last week," he said. "I do want the
house; I do appreciate its beauties; I do not consider it in good
repair, and I continue to think that the price for six weeks is very
high. Have the owners come down?"
Reed frowned again.
"I thought I made it clear, on my part," he answered, "that Mr. and Mrs.
Revelly are beyond the reach of communication. They are on their way to
Madeira. Before they left they set the price on their house, and I can