“Was she—is she—very pretty?” asked Elsie.
“She is very pretty—I used to think particularly pretty when she raised her doggy eyes to the defenceless Uncle Marcus, for he was defenceless until he knew she wanted to marry Mr. Flueyn.”
Elsie said he might have guessed she didn’t care for him, and Mrs. Sloane said that was a thing men hardly ever guessed.
“How do you understand men so well?” asked Elsie, and Mrs. Sloane said it was perhaps because she loved them so well.
Aunt Elsie sent off the telegram, of course making no excuse. If she wanted Diana she was perfectly at liberty to say so; she was delighted she was coming—delighted!
But when Diana came she was not so delighted, because it was a different Diana who came back from the one who had gone away. She was reserved, a little hard, and a little defiant. Aunt Elsie hoped she would look better after a night’s rest, she must be tired and hungry. Diana admitted hunger: she was frightfully hungry. Aunt Elsie, up in arms at once, supposed Uncle Marcus had at least given her a dinner-basket? Diana, defending Uncle Marcus, said he was in no way to blame. He had given her a parcel, she had asked for it instead of a basket; but when she had opened the parcel, she discovered the only things in it were two halves of a cocoanut shell and a flask of whiskey—not sustaining in the ordinary sense of the word.
“Do you mean to say,” asked Aunt Elsie with a righteous indignation the force of which shook her, “that he played a practical joke?—a man of his age—how abominable!”
Diana vowed it was too good a joke for Uncle Marcus to have perpetrated, and as a matter of fact it was the only part of the journey she had enjoyed, which was quite true, though she could not tell Elsie why. If Miles could play a practical joke, she had argued to herself, he could not be so angry as she imagined he was, though why he should be angry at all she could not imagine. Mr. St. Jermyn had understood the joke, poor as it had been, but Miles had not spoken to her after he came back from the island and the next morning he was gone. She could not tell Aunt Elsie this because it would mean telling her a great many other things that she could not tell any one.
Miles had not even shown her Robinson, the little bird he had found on the island—every one else had seen it and it had pecked every one’s fingers but hers.
The mistake Pillar had made with the luncheon-basket remained the one bright spot on a dark horizon because she did not know it was Pillar’s mistake.