“Yes, yes, pet, you are. Only—how _shall_ one tell the child?—not quite, dearie, so pleasant as if you cared—” Mrs. Budd stopped short, a little flustered with her own indelicacy, finishing the sentence with eyes and hands. In all her talks with Julia she had not before come quite so near to putting it plainly. Of the two, Julia, looking gravely into her mother’s face, was the least embarrassed. “But I don’t,” she said simply. “But try, pettie; try to!” Mrs. Budd’s voice was anxious, pleading. “Mother wishes it _so_ much.” Julia bowed her head over the nearest dachshund, turned his collar with deliberate fingers. She was frankly gaining time, casting about for some likely means to put off her own realization of the subject that made the air fairly electric between them. This she seemed to find in the young man who stepped out of the glass room upon the lawn, a little dazed in the noon glare. Her appeal was a sweet, ringing cry. “Oh, Mr. Longacre!” Seeing them together, he stood a minute, seemed to hesitate, then came toward them over the grass; hatless in the sunshine, he looked fair, and a little dreamy. His finger kept the place in his book. Mrs. Budd surveyed him with a solicitude amounting to annoyance. She turned on her daughter, her mouth shaped for speech, but his quick approach gave her no time. It was Julia who took up the snapped thread of talk in a fluttering sentence: “It’s my dogs—Mr. Longacre—I—I wanted you to see them.” She was flushed, forehead to chin. “Oh!” He seemed to just arrive at what was expected of him. “They’re very nice ones.” The flatness of it left all three stranded in uncomfortable silence. The thought in each mind of how much might be said, were one of the others away, kept them from saying anything through an interminable moment that merged unexpectedly into a common interest. It centered in a single figure lounging across the lawn from the breakfast-room. Thair came slowly, his chin in the air, a dead cigarette in his fingers. Julia frowned. Mrs. Budd rustled. Thair strolled, stopping to pluck an oleander, then tossing it away. Mrs. Budd struggled with the situation. She half turned to Longacre. Her eyes followed the fennel path. Again she opened her lips, with the odd effect of making her seemingly the author of Thair’s dilatory drawl. “I am an agitator,” he announced at large, “a disturber of the existing state of affairs.” His amused eyes lingered a moment on Julia’s anticipatory stare, on Longacre’s air of ready-for-anything. He addressed himself exclusively to Mrs. Budd. “Mrs. Essington has been wondering whether this was the morning you were going to show her—whatever it was about the Japanese chrysanthemum.” “Oh!” Mrs. Budd clapped her hand to her cheek. It was a gesture she had when suddenly remembering. “That’s all I know—what she said.” Thair was deliberate. “She was coming out, but I appointed myself ambassador.” “Oh, why, I—” Mrs. Budd began. The good lady was fairly cornered.