"It would be a lark if you joined us in Ilfracombe. We should be such a large party, wouldn't we? Fred and Trixie, of course. And Fred's pal, Napier Kirby and his wife—the new one—and her son by her old husband—and his mother ... Kirby's, I mean; she's a Maori!—well, no, not exactly; but whatever it is you call them when their mother or father was. And me and Jim; and Trixie's Aunt Emmeline: and you and Kathleen——"
"It's very good of you to want us," said Gareth, striving weakly to extricate himself from Lulu's gaily growing snowball.
"And perhaps some of your great author chums would come too; tell them we're going to have a glorious time." Lulu's glorious times always took on their hues from the brilliant anticipation and the glamorous retrospect between which they were squeezed to invisibility.
Kathleen remarked that probably they were now too late to book rooms in any Ilfracombe boarding-house.
"Oh, my dear, we're not going into a boarding-house. Not much! Fred has taken a house for three months, if you please. Swank, I told him!"
"That finishes it, then. Gareth and I can't plant ourselves on your brother and sister-in-law. We don't know them."
"Oh, but it's quite all right—you can pay your share; needn't stand on ceremony with Trix. You see, the house is ever so much too large for them; they took it together with the Kirbys; and even then Emmeline Frazer is paying towards it——Not Jim and me, of course; but then Fred is very grateful to Jim because he let him in as a favour into that big thing of his I told you about last month, and it's going to do frightfully well. I'm sure Trixie would love to have you—she's awfully keen on literary people. Shall I give you the address for you to write to her?"
Kathleen was rather attracted by the notion. She had that restlessness upon her to get something settled, which came from seeing everyone round about her flitting and migrating, astir as swallows with the fever of the South upon them.
"Shall we try it, Gareth?"
"If you like...."