Miss Fleet now began to be really alarmed. She had not, as a rule, a vivid imagination, but certainly horrors now began to crowd before her mental vision. There was that deep pond just beyond the shrubbery. There were some late water-lilies still to be found on its surface. Suppose—oh! suppose Phyllis had gone to it and had tried to drag in the lilies, and had— Miss Fleet turned quite white.
Or suppose she had gone right outside the fir plantation, and had been seen and appropriated by the gipsies who were camping in the field just beyond. Altogether poor Miss Fleet had a sad afternoon, while Phyllis, the naughty and the reckless, enjoyed herself immensely. It sometimes does happen like that even in the lives of naughty children: they have their naughty time, and they thoroughly like it for the present.
Phyllis had been very angry, and had determined to take her own way; and now she was having it, and her laugh was loud and her merriment excessive. For she had not been long in the field at the back of the stables, and Ralph had not long been enjoying the sweet pleasure of her society all to himself, when three heads appeared above the hedge and three gay voices uttered a shout, and Susie, Rosie, and Ned dashed across the field.
“Oh! oh! oh!” said Susie, “now we know why he was smartening himself up.”
“Didn’t he scrub his hands just,” cried Rosie, “and didn’t we watch him through the keyhole!”
“Oh, shut up, shut up!” said Ralph. “Now that you have come I suppose you must stay; but it was to me Phyllis wrote.—Was it not to me you wrote, Phyllis?”
“Well, yes,” said Phyllis. “Yours was the first name that I thought of, but I wanted you all. It is all of you I like best. Now you have come we will have a gay time.”
“But where?” asked Rosie. “Are we to come to the house after all?”
“I wish we could,” said Phyllis. “I do earnestly wish we could. Perhaps—perhaps it would be safe.”
She stood for a minute holding her finger to her lips; then a bright light filled her grey eyes and smiles wreathed her lips.