“How do you do it?” asked Phyllis with a critical gaze. “Now I don’t blush. I wish I could! I get a savage red when dad scolds me, and that is the nearest to blushing I can get at. But don’t worry! I will be demure and well-behaved for your sweet sake. It will be hard, you know, for I do so like a bit of fun. There isn’t a great deal of fun at home, you know!” she added wistfully.
Annie Barrimore laughed brightly and naturally. “Come! Come!” she ejaculated. “You do get a good deal of fun out of life!”
“You wouldn’t think so if you knew everything.”
“What is there to know, then?” inquired the elder woman. She remembered painfully that Colonel Lane had suspected Phyllis of hiding something.
“There are things even older people can’t understand,” answered Phyllis enigmatically.
There was a strained silence, followed happily by the voices of Uncle Robert and Dan in the garden.
“One always hears Robert a mile off,” remarked Mrs. Barrimore. “Come, we must welcome Dan.”
The two women found Philip in the entrance hall.
Philip was disposed to be very pleasant to-night. He embraced his mother with more than usual affection, and greeted Phyllis with a compliment on her frock, which greatly gratified that young woman, as Philip so rarely said “nice things.”
“You will scarcely believe it,” said Philip as he hung up his hat, “but I drove in in Thomas Alvin’s trap. He was passing the bungalow, and I was in the garden. He spoke quite affably, and I chanced to say I was going into Hastings when he offered me a seat in his trap, which I accepted. I did not want to ride in—in fact, Soda has got something wrong with her hock. I was going to cycle over, and I hate cycling.”