"As regards myself, the frock has succeeded beyond your wildest expectations. I cannot, of course, answer for my sister; but here she comes to answer for herself," I replied, as Annabel joined us. "Annabel, let me introduce you to Miss Wildacre."
"I am very pleased to see you, my dear, and to welcome you to Restham," said my sister in her most gracious manner. "I very much hope that you will like the place and be happy here."
"Of course she will," Frank chimed in; "because I do: Fay and I invariably like the same things."
"I trust that Miss Wildacre will endorse your good opinion," said Annabel.
"Oh, please don't call me Miss Wildacre. If you do I shall get home-sick at once; and that would be a pity, as I've no home to go to to cure it. If I'm to be happy, everybody must call me Fay: otherwise I shall wrap myself in a green-and-yellow melancholy, and sit, like Patience on a monument, smiling at Restham."
Annabel beamed at this suggestion. "I certainly think it will sound more friendly for me to call you by your Christian name, and for Reginald to do so too. It seems rather absurd for people of our age to call children of yours Mr. and Miss. Besides, we want to take the place of an uncle and an aunt to you, and uncles and aunts always call nephews and nieces by their Christian names."
I felt a distinct wave of irritation against Annabel. I was fully aware that I was twenty-four years older than the twins, but I saw no necessity for rubbing it in like this, and, after all, I was five years younger than Annabel.
After a little desultory conversation, my sister asked the young people to walk round the garden, before tea; so we started on one of those horticultural pilgrimages which are an absolute necessity to the moral welfare of all garden-lovers. Frank, having shared in the forget-me-not tribulation, was a partaker in Annabel's joy at the sky-blue blush now spreading over the bed; and Fay asked all the right questions and said all the right things. She even went so far as to wonder whether Queen Elizabeth ever sat under the mulberry tree, thereby giving Annabel her always-longed-for opportunity of explaining that mulberry trees were unknown in England until the reign of James the First.
Frank pulled up in ecstasy opposite a flame-coloured azalea that was just bursting into bloom. "Isn't it simply ripping?" he exclaimed. "It's for all the world like a coloured picture of the Burning Bush in a Sunday book!"
"It reminds one of Mrs. Browning's 'common bush afire with God,'" added his sister.