“But I looked forward to the walk,” he said.
“Oh!”
“I thought that perhaps you—”
“Oh,” she exclaimed again. But this time it was an entirely different sort of an “Oh.” It was a shy, fluttering monosyllable—resembling a bird who, flushed from its nest, flies but a little way. Her eyes reflected a certain eagerness—her quick glance towards the door a certain timidity. Her cheeks assumed a compromise.
“It would be just an easy turn, down and back, wouldn’t it? The sun is calling.”
Now Aladdin had been chafing three days in his stall unheeded by his mistress, whinnying an answer to the bugle call of this same sun as it sifted in through the chinks. But the most satisfaction he had found was in her whispered solace, “To-morrow, perhaps.” Yet of all living things outside the house, she loved him best.
“It would be very pleasant,” she confessed.
“Then—?”
“I think I may go,” she determined.
Which proved—what? It is very difficult to prove anything at all but this at least would seem to prove that Aunt Philomela was not as vigilant as she might have been. She came in just as the girl was adjusting her hat of brown Leghorn—in fact at the moment that Barnes was engrossed in watching the bewitching operation of the tying of a pert bow of damson-colored ribbon beneath an ear which looked of too delicate workmanship to be of any actual use. But that it was seemed evident from the fact that it detected Aunt Philomela’s steps long before his own of coarser fiber heard anything at all.