“Ah!” mourned Pixie deeply, “I’ll miss that, too! The times we’ve had, imagining a fortune arriving by the afternoon post, and spending it all before dinner! All the fun, and none of the trouble. But it’s dull, imagining all by oneself! And Dick’s no good. He calls it waste of time! I shall marry an Irishman, Bridgie, when my time comes!”
“Get into the train and don’t talk nonsense!” said Bridgie firmly. She felt it prophetic that on this eve of departure Pixie’s remarks should again touch on husbands and weddings, but not for the world would she have hinted as much. She glanced at the other occupant of the carriage—a stout, middle-aged woman, and was on the point of inviting her chaperonage when a warning gleam in Pixie’s eyes silenced the words on her lips. So presently the train puffed out of the station, and Bridgie Victor turned sadly homewards even as Pixie seated herself with a bounce, and smiled complacently into space.
“That’s over!” she said to herself with a sigh of relief, glad as ever, to be done with painful things and able to look forward to the good to come. “She thinks she’s miserable, the darling, but she’ll be as happy as a grig the moment she gets back to Dick and the children. That’s the worst of living with married sisters! They can manage so well without you. I’d prefer some one who was frantic if I turned my back—”
She smiled at the thought, and met an ingratiating smile upon the face of her travelling companion. The companion was stout and elderly, handsomely dressed, and evidently of a sociable disposition. It was the height of her ambition on a railway journey to meet another woman to whom she could shout confidences for hours upon end, but it was rarely that her sentiments were returned. Fate had been kind to her to-day in placing Pixie O’Shaughnessy in the same carriage.
“The young lady seemed quite distressed to leave you. Is she your sister?”
“She is. Do you think we are alike?”
“I—I wouldn’t go so far as to say alike!” the large lady said blandly; “but there’s a look! As I always say, there’s no knowing where you are with a family likeness. My eldest girl—May—takes after her father; Felicia, the youngest, is the image of myself; yet they’ve been mistaken for each other times and again. It’s a turn of the chin.—Is she married?”
“Who? Bridgie—my sister? Oh yes—very much. Six years.”
“Dear me! She looks so young! My May is twenty-seven. She has had her chances, of course. Any children?”
“Wh—” Pixie’s mind again struggled after the connection. “Oh, two—a boy and a girl. They are called,” she added, with a benevolent consciousness of sparing further effort, “Patrick and Patricia.”