"Well, Mater, now that you've finished laughing, perhaps you will tell us what it's all about?"
"Indeed, I won't," answered she; and there was almost a wink in her innocent old eye as she turned to me and said: "It is a secret—isn't it?—a secret between us two," and she patted my hand as if I had been her son.
I promised her with exaggerated solemnity never to reveal it, and she patted my hand again and added:
"I see you'll become one of us—one of the Tyringham Colony; we always come together at every harvest time—as indeed do all the other colonies—only we think our colony is just a little bit nicer than every other."
"And so does every other," said Ariston, "think itself better than the rest."
"And so all are happy," answered the Mater convincingly. "But have you met your neighbor, Anna of Ann?"
I turned to my right, and saw that Lydia was not the only beautiful woman at Tyringham. Anna of Ann was of a different type. Her features were delicate; the eye was not remarkable; indeed, her glance was veiled and almost disappointing; her nose was ordinary; her skin clear but colorless; it was assuredly in her mouth, and perhaps in her low forehead and clustering hair, that her beauty resided; and as she spoke there were little movements of the lips that were bewitching:
"No, I have not been haymaking with Ariston's group and so we have not spoken," she said. "But I saw you this morning after breakfast, and"—she added archly—"I stared at you with all the others; we were dreadfully rude! But then, there was some excuse for us, wasn't there?"
"Every excuse," I answered reassuringly. "But tell me, what do you do when you are not haymaking?"
"What do you mean; work or play?"