“She calls herself a Sister! I don’t understand it, for she seems to have been bent on marrying poor Henry.”
“She never took any vows.”
“Then why does she wear a ridiculous cap over all that hair?”
By and by they were met by Bernard Underwood striding along. “Holloa! have you seen Angel and her darling? She is a perfect slave to the little thing, and one only gets fragments of her.”
“She seems very fond of her,” said Bessie.
“Just kept her alive, you see. Poor old Angel! She is all for one thing at a time! Are you going up to Clipstone?”
“I think we shall find Phyllis at Beechcroft.”
“Yes, she is driving there to lunch, and Angel is to bring the little cornstalk over to make friends with our Lily! I trust the creature goes to sleep now, and I may get a word out of Angel!” Wherewith he dashed on, and the two ladies agreed that “those Underwoods seemed to be curiously impulsive.”
They were, however, much better satisfied with the Ceylonese Lily, who was a very well trained civilised specimen, conversing very prettily over one of Aunt Jane’s picture books, which Bessie looked at with her, and showing herself fully able to read the titles beneath, a feat of which Lena was quite incapable, though she was less on the defensive than she had shown herself at the Goyle, and Angela was far more at her ease than when she was conscious that “Field’s” original love was watching the introduction to his sisters. Besides, Bernard’s presence was sunshine to her, and the two expanded into bright reminiscences and merry comparisons of their two lives, absolutely delightful to themselves, and to Phyllis and her Aunt Jane, and which would have been the same to Elizabeth, if she had not been worried at Susan’s evident misunderstanding of—and displeasure at—the quips and cranks of the happy brother and sister; also she was bent on promoting an intercourse between Lily and Lena, over the doll she had brought for the former. She was a little hurt that Lena had not been accompanied by the blue-eyed article with preposterously long eyelashes that had been bestowed on her at the Goyle; but the little Australian had no opinion of dolls, and had let the one bought for her at Sydney be thrown overboard by the ship’s monkey.
“That was cruel!” said Lily, fondling her black-eyed specimen.