The more he thought about it the more he wished that, if only for a
week, he were at least a sixteenth cousin of the Gray family, that he
might be present at that Christmas party. But during the week chance did
not even throw him in the way of meeting the various members of the
family proper, and when Saturday night came he had discovered no
prospect of attaining his wish. He knew that the guests were to arrive
on the following Monday. Christmas Day was on Saturday; the night of the
party then would be Friday night. And the Judge, in taking leave of him,
did not even mention again his wish that Richard might see the guests
together.
He was coming out of the library, on his way to the hall door, hope
having died hard and his spirits being correspondingly depressed, when
Fate at last intervened in his behalf. Fate took the form of young Mrs.
Stephen Gray, descending the stairs with a two-year-old child in her
arms, such a rosy, brown-eyed cherub of a child that an older and more
hardened bachelor than Richard Kendrick need not have been suspected of
dissimulation if he had stopped short in his course as Richard did, to
admire and wonder.
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