"Well, ra—ther! If he goes in yours there's no room for me; if he goes in mine there is no room for you. That's the difference."
"Children, do stop tearing Bob to fragments," lisped Mrs. Galbraith with some amusement. "If you keep on pulling him to pieces he won't go anywhere. Now Roger, you take Bob sailing and have a good visit with him, and bring him back so he can have tea with your grandmother at five; this evening the rest of us will have our chance to see him."
She did not look at Cynthia, but with a woman's forethought she remembered that the verandas were roomy and that the moon was full soon after dinner. Cynthia remembered it too and smiled.
"Yes, go ahead, Roger," she called. "Take Bob round the bay. It is a lovely sail and as he hasn't been here before he will enjoy it."
It was only a little past five when the two young men returned, a glow of health and pleasure on their faces.
"Now, Bobbie, do make haste," Mrs. Galbraith said, coming to meet him. "Mother's tea has already gone up, and you know how she detests waiting. Her maid is there in the hall to show you the way. Hurry along, dear boy."
Robert Morton needed no second bidding and at once followed the middle-aged English woman up the staircase and into a small, chintz-hung sitting room that looked out on the sea.
At the farther end of it, seated before a low tea table, was a stately, white-haired lady, very erect, very handsome and very elegantly dressed in a gown of soft black material. At the neck, which was turned away, she wore a fichu of filmy lace tinted by time to a creamy tone and held in place by an old-fashioned medallion of seed pearls. White ruffles at the wrists drooped over her delicately veined hands and showed only the occasional flash of a ring and her perfectly manicured finger tips. Summer or winter, fair weather or foul, Madam Lee never varied this costume, and it seemed to possess some measure of its owner's eternal youth, for it was always fresh and its lustrous folds always swept the ground in the same dignified fashion. Indeed for those who knew Madam Lee to think of her in any other guise would have been impossible. Her silvered hair was parted and rippled over her forehead to her ears where it was slightly puffed and caught back with combs of shell, and from beneath it two little black eyes peered out with a bird's alertness of gaze. Although age had claimed her strength, it was evident from the woman's vivacious expression that she had lost none of her interest in life and as she now sat before the silver-laden tea table there was a girlish anticipation in her eager pose.
"Ah, you scamp!" cried she, when she heard her visitor's footstep in the upper hall, "I have been waiting for you a full five minutes. I don't wait for every one, I would have you know. Come here and give an account of yourself."