“She’s my companion,” was the stern response, “my hired companion, and I do not wish you to treat her as an equal.”
“Equal! She’s superior to anything I’ve ever seen yet.”
“Oh, you rogue! You say that, or its equivalent, about every girl you meet.”
“Pooh! Nonsense! But I say, aunty, she’ll come down to dinner, won’t she?”
“Yes—I suppose so. But mind now, Philip, you’re not to talk to her as if she were of your own class.”
“No’m; I won’t.”
Reassured by the knowledge that he should see her again, Philip was most affable and agreeable, and chatted with his aunt in a happy frame of mind.
Patty, exiled to her own room, decided to write to Nan.
She filled several sheets with accounts of her doings at Mrs. Van Reypen’s, and gloated over the fact that there were now but four days of her week left.
“I shall win this time,” she wrote, “and, though life here is not a bed of roses, yet it is not so very bad, and when the week is over I shall look back at it with lots of funny thoughts. Oh, Nan, prepare a fatted calf for Thursday night, for I shall come home a veritable Prodigal Son! Of course, I don’t mean this literally; we have lovely things to eat here, but it’s ‘hame, hame, fain wad I be.’ I won’t write again, I’ll probably get no chance, but send Miller for me at four o’clock on Thursday afternoon.”