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The ribbon had glided from Desire's hair, almost as if the vital, resilient mass resentfully freed itself from restraint by the bit of satin. Now she put up her hands with a slow movement and drew two broad strands of the glittering tresses across her shoulders, veiling her face. "Wait," she answered Phillida, most unexpectedly. "I must be sure quite sure! I must think. If you will wait."
She instantly pulled it away, and hid her face again. "Fair Phillida flouts me," he said. "Doesn't baby like papa a bit? Ah, well, he is going to cry, then." He buried his face in his napkin and sobbed ostentatiously.
"On the contrary, it would have added fifty dollars to the price of this copy if the original page had been complete, or if it could have been mended without a possibility of detection say by a process of faith-cure." Philip said this laughing, as he set a chair for Phillida, and then sat down himself. "I beg pardon, Phillida. I oughtn't to jest about what you feel to be sacred."
Here he found a seat shaded by the horizontal limbs of an exotic tree and confronted by a thicket that shut out at this season almost all but little glimpses of the Tiffany house and the frowning Lenox. He asked Phillida to sit down, and he sat beside her. The momentary silence that followed was unendurable to Phillida's excited nerves, so she said: "Mr. Millard, it was a splendid thing to do."
Gunstone was hopeful, but that Phillida seemed pretty ill. The next morning Millard's card with "Kind inquiries" was sent in, and the reply was returned that Phillida was no worse. Her mother showed her the card, and Phillida looked at it for half a minute and then wearily put it away. An hour later Robert appeared at the door with a bunch of callas, to which Mrs. Hilbrough's card was attached.
Phillida said this with a momentary fear of hearing Agatha overturn another chair behind the sliding doors; but Mrs. Callender had taken herself and Agatha to the basement, from motives of delicacy which Agatha was hardly old enough to appreciate. Mrs. Gouverneur never did anything by halves. She made herself agreeable to Mrs.
I think Phillida divined something of my trouble, for she leaned out the door to me and held up her face like a child's to be kissed. "I am so happy," she whispered. I turned to Vere; who had a long envelope in readiness to put in my hand. "I guess you might like to have these for a while, Mr. Locke," he said, with one of his slow, straightforward glances.
Why couldn't people walk to the table without hooking themselves together, and why couldn't they eat their food without nonsense? But he showed his vexation in a characteristic way by laughing inwardly at his wife and Millard, and most of all at himself for an old fool. Phillida Callender was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who had gone as missionary to one of the Oriental countries.
She felt in her pocket for her card-case, but of course that had been left in the pocket of a better dress, and she must write upon one of those little cards that the house furnishes; and all this while the clerk would be wondering who she was. But there was a native self-reliance about Phillida that shielded her from contempt.
Callender found Phillida so weak that she hesitated to speak to her of a note she had received in the morning mail. It might do good; it might do harm to let her know its contents. Agatha was consulted and she turned the scale of Mrs. Callender's decision. "Phillida, dear," said the mother, "I don't know whether I ought to mention it to you or not. You are very weak this morning.
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