"I can really afford to be greedy, Cousin Mary," she said, with a laughing apology. "I've been starved at Inver. How the stacks of food went! They have such healthy appetites. I couldn't eat potato-cakes, soaked in butter, nor doorsteps as the boys called them, of bread and jam and honey. Fearfully fattening food."
"You remind me of when you came to me and started to grow out of your clothes with such alarming rapidity. When your white satin, long-waisted frock grew too small for you, you said, for you did not like giving it up, 'I can really get into it if I hold myself in like this. And anyhow I've given up pudding!'"
"Ah, that was the worst of me," said Eileen mournfully. "I could never continue long doing without pudding."
She came down to dinner wearing a pale green frock with a prim fichu of chiffon and lace. Terry had already arrived and was in the drawing-room, standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire.
"Hullo, Eileen!" he shouted, "How stunning you look! You grow prettier every day!"
The compliment was too brotherly in its easy candour to please her altogether: but she knew very well she was "stunning." She could see herself in a long old-fashioned mirror on the wall. Her hair was like gold floss. There was no sign of the embonpoint she feared in the slender grace of her figure. The pearls about her neck became her mightily, as did the green ribbon, the same shade as her dress, snooded in her hair.
She lifted her eyes to the boy's frank gaze in a way which she had usually found very effective. She had been able to do anything with Terry when she looked at him like that, and she had tried the same allurement on others than Terry.
"You're only just back," he went on. "Jolly nice of you to come for me. The mater must have missed you."
"They insist on my presence at Inver now and again. I don't know why.
It is very unreasonable of them!"
She put out a satin slipper and stirred Shot with it.