. "I have
had nothing to eat since breakfast, and she will be hungry long before
we reach your house. May I not take her to dinner here in town?"

"Please do not call your cousin 'Phil'," she rebuked me, and paused to
deliberate. "You had no luncheon, you say?"

"None."

"Why not? Were you ill?"

"No; just busy. I forgot lunch. I am beginning to feel it, now. Still,
if you wish us to come straight home, do not consider me!"

I knew of old how submission mollified Aunt Caroline. She relented, now.

"Well----! You are very good, Roger, to save your uncle a trip into the
city to meet her. I must not impose upon you. But, a quiet hotel!"

"Certainly, Aunt."

"Phillida does not deserve pampering enjoyment. I am consenting for your
sake."

"Thank you, Aunt. I wonder, then, if you would mind if we stopped to see
a show that I especially want to look over, for business reasons? We
could come out on the theatre express; as we have done before, you
remember?"

"Yes, but----"

"Thank you. I'll take good care of her. Good-bye."

The receiver was still talking when I hung up. There is no other form of
conversation so incomparably convenient.

The train arrived within the half-hour. With the inrush of travelers, I
sighted Phillida's sober young figure moving along the cement platform.
She walked with dejection. Her gray suit represented a compromise
between fashion and her mother's opinion of decorum, thus attaining a
length and fulness not enough for grace yet too much for jauntiness. Her
solemn gray hat was set too squarely upon the pale-brown hair, brushed
back from her forehead. Her nice, young-girl's eyes looked out through a
pair of shell-rimmed spectacles. She was too thin and too pale to
content me.

When she saw me coming toward her, her face brightened and colored quite
warmly. She waved her bag with actual abandon and her lagging step
quickened to a run.

"Cousin Roger!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "Oh, how good of you to
come!"

She gripped my hands in a candid fervor of relief and pleasure.

"I am so glad it is you," she insisted. "I was sorry the train could not
be later; I wished, almost, it would never get in--and all the time it
was you who were waiting for me!"

"It was, and now you are about to share an orgy," I told her. "I have
your mother's permission to take you to dinner, Miss Knox."

"Here? In town? Just us?"

"Yes. And afterward we will take in any show you fancy. How does that
st