"Say wuff!" echoed Angela, with a dazzling smile at her elders, and an effort not to tumble over on the grass.
Phyllis pounced on her babies at Allan's alarming suggestion, and managed to hug them both at once; an ordeal which Philip stood with every evidence of pleasure, and Angela under protest.
"My poor little lambs! ... Allan, this is the first chickenpox they've had up there since the summer we came. We'd been married a month or so, and you weren't quite sure whether you liked me or not. Do you remember?"
"I remember that first summer," said he. "It's the only part of those seven years that I do want to remember. But the chickenpox part of it had escaped me."
"Well, of course," his wife admitted, "in those days children's diseases were nothing whatever in our lives. But when Johnny Hewitt refers to it as that wonderful summer seven years ago, I have discovered that he means it was wonderful because he saved forty-three out of forty-three cases, not because you and I had married each other to please your mother, and were finding out that it was rather nice."
"I'll be hanged if I know to this day what possible niceness there was for you in being married to a man everybody thought would never get well," said Allan.
"He was you," explained Phyllis matter-of-factly, sitting down on a step to look at him better. "Anybody'd fall in love with you, Allan. You know perfectly well that it even happens now."
"Certainly," said he scornfully. "My well-known beauty and charm attract all classes; they besiege my path by day and night. By Jove, Phyllis, there's one now, the flapper I saw in the dining-room lately. She's doubtless come over to say that she'll wait for me till you're through, being young. She's pretty, too."
Phyllis laughed, and patted his foot, the only part of him she could reach without getting up. "Now, now—I meant no harm. You can't help being attractive.... Why, it's the girl in brown, the one who started out of a tree like a dryad, and showed me the way Philip had gone, last night. She was the loveliest creature I ever saw. Look, Allan, she's like a Rossetti picture."
"She is like a Rossetti," he answered, "but she looks rather happier. Most of the Rossetti ladies I ever saw hoped to die of consumption shortly."