"Meaning Gertrude—?" said this wicked woman, innocently.
"Oh,—I mean Hilda, of course! She is remarkably intelligent, don't you think so?"
Mrs. Merryweather assented warmly, and added praises of her own. Hildegarde's little ears would surely have burned if she could have heard the good lady. As for Roger, he listened with great complacency.
"Yes!" he said. "She is sympathetic, and unselfish,—remarkably so, it seems to me; and—and she takes an interest in things,—I mean real things, such, as girls usually care nothing about."
"Perigees, for example," said his sister-in-law.
"Well," said Roger, laughing, "yes, I suppose I do mean perigees, and that kind of thing. They are not in your line, Miranda, I know."
"Oh, but I respect them!" said Mrs. Merryweather. "There is nothing I respect more highly than a perigee, unless it be an apogee, which always sounds like the beginning of an incantation. So Hilda likes them, does she?"
"Of course," said Roger, slowly, skipping stones over the pond with thoughtful accuracy; "she has never studied any of these things, but she has really an astonishing aptitude for them. And her hand is so steady, and she has such a true eye."
"Was that why you kept her sitting on a rock, waving a towel, for three mortal hours, yesterday morning?" asked his sister-in-law, dryly.
Roger turned scarlet.