They are all laughing still—indeed, their merriment has quite reached a height—when Susan, looking over her shoulder, nearly drops her cup and saucer, and sits up as if listening.
‘Someone is coming,’ says she.
‘Aunt Jemima,’ indignantly declares Betty, who is sitting up too.
Tramp, tramp, tramp comes a foot along the gravel path that skirts the side of the house away from them. Tramp, tramp; evidently two of the heaviest feet in Christendom are approaching.
‘You’re right,’ whispers Dom; ‘’tis “the fa’ o’ her fairy feet.” Aunt Jemima, to a moral.’
And Aunt Jemima it is, sweeping round the house with her head well up, and the desire to impress, that they all know so fatally well, full upon her.
‘Don’t stir, Mr. Crosby; I really beg you won’t. This is a rather al-fresco entertainment, but I know you will excuse these wild children.’ Here the wild children gave way silently, convulsively.
‘It is the most charming entertainment I have been at for years,’ says Crosby pleasantly. ‘Where will you sit? Here?’ He is quite assiduous in his attentions, especially about the rug on which she is to sit—not his rug, at all events; Susan has half of that.
‘Thank you,’ says Miss Barry, ‘but I need not trouble you; I do not intend to stay. I merely came out to see if these remarkably ill-mannered young people were taking care of you.’
She speaks with a stiff and laboured smile upon her lips, but an evident determination to be amiable at all risks.