From the sitting-room came an impatient summons. "Paul, will you never come!"
"What is it, Hilary?" Pauline asked, coming to sit at one end of the old sofa.
"That's what I want to know," Hilary answered from the other end. "Impatience says you've been writing all sorts of mysterious letters this afternoon, and that you came home just now looking like—-"
"Well, like what?"
"Like you'd been up to something—and weren't quite sure how the grown-ups were going to take it," Patience explained from the rug before the fire.
"How do you know I have been writing—anything?" Pauline asked.
"There, you see!" Patience turned to Hilary, "she doesn't deny it!"
"I'm not taking the trouble to deny or confirm little girl nonsense,"
Pauline declared. "But what makes you think I've been writing letters?"
"Oh, 'by the pricking of my thumbs'!" Patience rolled over, and resting her sharp little chin in her hands, stared up at her sisters from under her mop of short red curls. "Pen! Ink! Paper! And such a lot of torn-up scraps! It's really very simple!"
But Pauline was on her way to the dining-room. "Terribly convincing, isn't it?" Her tone should have squelched Patience, but it didn't.