Phil kicked an old carpeted footstool to the hearth, and dropped upon it at her mother's feet. "What an old fraud Amy is not to have told me!" She waited for the ultimate sounds of departure, and kissed her fingers to the closed door. Then she raised her arms quickly and drew down her mother's head until their cheeks touched. "Thunder!" said Amzi, and left them together. CHAPTER XVII PHIL'S PERPLEXITIES Phil reached home shortly before one, and called her father's name in the hall without eliciting a response. The odor of roasting turkey was in the house, and she noted that the table was set for four. The maid-of-all-work was moulding cranberry jelly when Phil thrust her head into the kitchen. "There's going to be company for dinner," the woman explained. "Your pa came in and told me so. He's gone down to his office for a minute." Phil had not heard that they were to have guests. She stood in the dining-room viewing the two extra places and wondering whom her father had asked. Usually on holidays, when the rest of the family assembled at Amzi's, the Kirkwoods had eaten their midday meal alone. If he had asked the Bartletts' to share this particular Christmas feast it must have been without premeditation, for she had herself visited the sisters on her way to Amzi's, and nothing had been said about a later meeting. It was not like her father to invite guests without consulting her. Her mother's return had changed the world's orbit. Nothing was as it had been; nothing seemed quite real. The house in Buckeye Lane, about which so many happy memories clustered, was suddenly become distorted and all out of drawing, as though she viewed it through a defective window-pane. She went upstairs and glanced warily into her father's bedroom, as though fearing to find ghosts there. As she redressed her hair she regarded herself in the mirror with a new curiosity. She was a stranger to herself; she was not the same Phil Kirkwood who had stood before the glass that morning, but a very different person--a Phil who had come suddenly upon a hidden crevasse in the bright, even meadow of her life and peered into an undreamed-of abyss. If her mother--that mother who had always lived less vividly in her imagination than her favorite characters in fiction--had not proved so bewilderingly, so enthrallingly captivating, so wholly charming and lovable, she might have grappled the situation with some certainty. But no woman had ever been like that! Her mother was the most wonderful being in the world! Little by little through the years her aunts had been creating in Phil's mind a vulgar, vain, wicked figure and pointing to it as a fair portrait of her mother. She had always disliked her aunts; she found herself hating them now with a passionate intensity that frightened her.