"I don't want her to know."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because," was the purely feminine answer. She added, troubled by his grave silence, "Mummy might not want me to see so much of him, if she knew. She can't realize that I'm grown up now. Old people forget how they felt when they were young." She was vaguely trying to express love's dread of being brought to earth, of being hampered by the fetters of a fixed relation.
"'Old people!' Your mother?" Philip spoke rather sharply.
"Oh, well, not old, of course. Still, she's too old to fall in love.—Anyway, there are some things a girl can't talk about with her mother; you ought to know there are." The glance she gave him was both embarrassed and appealing.
Alas for Kate's carefully fostered intimacy with her children, vanished at the first touch of a warmer breath!
Philip put his hand over hers on the bridle-rein. "My dear," he said earnestly, "there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you cannot talk about with your mother. She's that sort. Always remember it."
She jerked her hand away with a pettish gesture. "For goodness' sake, stop being so ancient and fatherly! And what right have you to tell me anything about mother? I don't mind your explaining about God to me, and Christian duty, and things like that. It's your business, and I suppose it bores you as much as anybody. But when you talk as if you had a special vested right in my own mother,—that's too much! As if you could possibly know her as well as I do!"
She spurred her horse and galloped ahead furiously. But at the next turn of the road she was waiting, remorseful.
"Forgive me for being a crosspatch, Flippy dear?" Her voice would have coaxed forgiveness from a stone. "I always am sort of—sort of foolish about mummy, you know."