‘You were just in time,’ cries she, running up to him, with happy camaraderie in her smile. ‘But for you, we should have been hunting him all over the place. What lucky fortune brought you at this moment?’—smiling blandly into his eyes and giving him her hand. ‘Just happening to be passing by?’
‘No, I was coming to see you all,’ says Crosby. He has nearly stopped at the ‘you,’ but she looks so young, so without a thought behind her, that he feels it would be useless. She would not understand, and even if she did it would only annoy her. A girl of the world—that would be different. She would laugh at this suggestion of a flirtation; but Susan—
‘Well, come and see us all,’ says Betty gaily. ‘We’re all round the corner, I fancy.’
And, indeed, most of them are, the children in the far distance chasing butterflies with a net just constructed by Dom, whilst he and Carew are listening with apparently engrossed interest to their aunt, who, with curls shaking and an air of general excitement about her, is holding forth.
‘Is that you at last, Susan?’ says she, shaking her curls more vigorously than ever. ‘Where have you been?—How d’ye do, Mr. Crosby?—I must say, Susan, you are never to be found when wanted.’
‘The hens got into the garden,’ begins Susan, colouring a little beneath this rebuke uttered before Crosby.
‘Oh, hens! What are hens,’ cries Miss Barry tragically, ‘when human beings are dying?’
‘Dying?’
‘Yes. I’ve just been to see poor dear Miss Blake, and I really believe she is at death’s door.’
‘Oh, I am sorry!’ says Susan.