“Certainly. Alice, hold out your fan instantly.”
The girl humoured the joke, laughing.
Trevor pressed his lips to the perfumed sticks. “I will tell Mrs. Trevor,” he said, “and that will decide her.”
“It will decide her not to come here at all next year if you tell her all.”
“He never tells me all,” said Mrs. Trevor, catching so much of the talk as she came in from some hospitable cares in the dining-room. “They're incapable of it. What has he been doing now?”
“Nothing. Or I will tell you when we are alone, Mrs. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with burlesque sympathy. “We oughtn't to have a scene on both sides of the foot-lights.”
A boyish face, all excitement, was thrust out between the curtains forming the proscenium of the little theatre. “All ready, Mrs. Trevor?”
“Yes, all ready, Jim.”
He dashed the curtains apart, and marred the effect of his own disappearance from the scene by tripping over the long legs of Jove, stretched out to the front, where he sat on Mrs. Trevor's richest rug, propped with sofa cushions on either hand.
“So perish all the impious race of titans, enemies of the gods!” said Mavering solemnly, as the boy fell sprawling. “Pick the earth-born giant up, Vulcan, my son.”