Eddy whistled in a mannish fashion. Charlotte continued adjusting her hat and smoothing her fluff of dark hair. Her face, in the mirror which hung between the two front windows, looked not so angry as sorrowful, and with a dewy softness in the pretty eyes, and a slight quiver about the soft mouth. Eddy glanced several times at this reflected face; then he stole, with a sudden, swift motion, up behind his sister, threw his arms around her neck, although it hurt him cruelly, and laid his boyish cheek against her soft, girlish one.
“No, you need not think that will make up,” whispered Charlotte. But she herself pressed her cheek tenderly against his, and then laughed softly. “Try not to do so again, dear,” she said. “It mortified me, and it is not being a credit to papa. Think a little and try to remember how you have been brought up.”
“Charlotte,” whispered Eddy, in the softest, most furtive of whispers, casting a glance over his shoulder.
“What is it, dear?”
“I suppose they”—he indicated by a motion of his shoulder his host and hostess—“are just as nice people as—we are—as the Carrolls.”
“Of course they are,” replied Charlotte, hastily. She pushed Eddy away softly and began to fuss again with her hat. “We must go home right away,” she said, “or they will worry.”
“There is no need of his going home with you, as long as I am here,” said Eddy.
“Of course not,” replied Charlotte.
But it seemed that Anderson himself had other views, and his mother also, for although a sudden and not altogether easy suspicion had come to her, she whispered aside to him that he must certainly accompany the two home.
“It is quite dark already,” she said, “and it is not fit for that child to go alone with nobody but that boy, after the fright she has had this afternoon. She is just in the condition now when a shadow might upset her. You really must go with her, Randolph.”