"Only just to practise with for a few weeks. Dad, don't be angry. He has a new one, so he doesn't miss it. Why"—warming to her subject and forgetting for the moment that she was in great danger of still further disgracing herself in her father's eyes by her confession—"I can hit even a small object at a very considerable distance five times out of six."
The perplexed look deepened in her father's eyes, but the irritability had cleared away. He toyed with the open letter that he held in his hand. "I suppose it is for this as well as for your other schoolboy pranks that your aunt has invited only Rose. But I don't like it—it is not right. If it were not for the unfairness to Rose, I should have refused outright. As it is, the invitation has been accepted by me, and it must stand, for Rose must not be deprived of her pleasures because you like——"
"Invitation! What invitation?" interrupted Patty.
"Your aunt is giving a big ball on the 13th, and she is insistent that Rose should be present. It will be the child's first ball, and I cannot gainsay her. But, Patty, I should like you both to go. You are seventeen, are you not?"
"Seventeen and a half," returned Patty with a little choke in her voice.
It was the first she had heard of the invitation, and it stung her to think that Lady Glendower thought her too much of a hoyden to invite her with the sister who was but one year older. Patty was girl enough to love dancing even above her other amusements, and the unbidden tears came into her eyes as she stood looking forlornly at her father.
Colonel Bingham coughed, and tapped his writing-desk with the letter.
"Seventeen and a half," he repeated, "quite old enough to go to a ball. Never mind, Patty, I've a good mind to give a ball myself and leave out her younger daughter, only that it would be too much like tu quoque, and your aunt has a reason for not extending her invitation here which I should not have in relation to your cousin Fanny, eh, Patty?"
But Patty's eyes were still humid, and she could only gaze dumbly at her father with such a pathetic look on her pretty face that Colonel Bingham could not stand it.
"Look here, child," he said, "why aren't you more like your sister Rose? Then her pleasures would be always yours——"