'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both. Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the rockiest, most determined smile. 'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly--' 'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs. Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger. 'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.' Mrs. Barnes looked grave. 'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however, regard it as incurable. On the contrary--I have helped her to check it, and she is much better than she was.' 'But what are you afraid she will do _now_?' I asked; and Dolly, coming out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer. But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot--I think the heel came off--and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more intimate lines. And so she did. 'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.' 'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically. 'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I associate with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.' 'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might be real friends.' 'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest. 'Oh yes--we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people who talk together about anything and everything. _Almost_ anything and everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on hesitatingly. '_Most_ things,' I amended. 'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.