“Twenty!” she said still more resignedly—­“four years younger than you are, Ailsa Paige!  Oh dear—­and here I am, absolutely unmarried.  That is not a very maidenly thought, I suppose, is it Ailsa?”

“You always were a romantic child,” observed Ailsa, digging vigorously in the track of a vanishing May beetle.  But when she disinterred him her heart failed her and she let him scramble away.

“There!  He’ll probably chew up everything,” she said.  “What a sentimental goose I am!”

“The first trace of real sentiment I ever saw you display,” began Camilla reflectively, “was the night of my party.”

Ailsa dug with energy. “That is absurd!  And not even funny.”

“You were sentimental!”

“I—­well there is no use in answering you,” concluded Ailsa.

“No, there isn’t.  I’ve seen women look at men, and men look back again—­the way he did!”

“Dear, please don’t say such things!”

“I’m going to say ’em,” insisted Camilla with malicious satisfaction.  “You’ve jeered at me because I’m tender-hearted about men.  Now my chance has come!”

Ailsa began patiently:  “There were scarcely a dozen words spoken——­”

Camilla, delighted, shook her dark curls.

“You’ve said that before,” she laughed.  “Oh, you pretty minx!—­you and your dozen words!”

Ailsa Paige arose in wrath and stretched out a warning arm among her leafless roses; but Camilla placed both hands on the fence top and leaned swiftly down from the veranda steps,

“Forgive me, dear,” she said penitently.  “I was only trying to torment you.  Kiss me and make up.  I know you too well to believe that you could care for a man of that kind.”

Ailsa’s face was very serious, but she lifted herself on tiptoe and they exchanged an amicable salute across the fence.

After a moment she said:  “What did you mean by ’a man of that kind’?”

Camilla’s shrug was expressive.  “There are stories about him.”

Ailsa looked thoughtfully into space.  “Well you won’t say such things to me again, about any man—­will you, dear?”

“You never minded them before.  You used to laugh.”

“But this time,” said Ailsa Paige, “it is not the least bit funny.  We scarcely exchanged——­”

She checked herself, flushing with annoyance.  Camilla, leaning on the garden fence, had suddenly buried her face in both arms.  In feminine plumpness, when young, there is usually something left of the schoolgirl giggler.

The pretty girl below remained disdainfully indifferent.  She dug, she clipped, she explored, inhaling, with little thrills, the faint mounting odour of forest loam and sappy stems.

“I really must go back to New York and start my own garden,” she said, not noticing Camilla’s mischief.  “London Terrace will be green in another week.”

“How long do you stay with the Craigs, Ailsa?”