It so happened that she mentioned her exploit in the course of the following day to her cousins. They were all cross and out of sorts, their mother having forbidden a walk to Bensdale that day—Bensdale, where there awaited them an instalment of a new serial—Phyllis and the Duke having been duly united by an archbishop in the bonds of matrimony, amid a blaze of splendour and a pageant of ancestral halls.
"We might just as well live in a prison," grumbled Maddie.
"Prisons are not so easy to get out of," replied Melicent: "If you dislike it so, why don't you run away, and decline to come back unless they make terms?"
"Run away!" they all cried; and Gwen added, with a sneer: "Why don't you try, if it's so easy?"
Melicent answered in all good faith:
"Because I don't want to seem ungrateful. I know it was good of Uncle Edmund to ask me here. Only, you see, I don't fit, and I never shall, because I don't want to be the kind of person that Aunt Minna wants to make me. So I shall not stay; but I don't want to run away in the night, as though they ill-treated me."
The girls clamoured to know how she would set about running away, if it came to that; and she simply told them that she had been out the night before, and explained how she managed it. They listened with deep interest.
"Shall you tell them you went?" they asked.
"No; not unless I am asked. I don't think myself bound to account to them for every minute of my time."
"Yet you played the Pharisee yesterday, and would not join our game."