That was what Mr. Beresford and Phil were said to be doing during the weeks when they went every day to Hetherton Place, Phil, who had nothing to do, riding over early every morning, and Mr. Beresford, who had a great deal to do, going in the evening, or as early in the afternoon as he could get away from his office. It was not unusual for the two to meet on the causeway, Phil coming from and Mr. Beresford going to the little lady, who bewitched and intoxicated them both, though in a very different way. With Phil, her cousin, she laughed, and played, and flirted, and quarreled—hot, bitter quarrels sometimes—in which she always had the better of Phil, inasmuch as her command of language was greater, and her rapid gestures added point to her sarcasm. But if her anger was the hotter and fiercer, she was always the first to make overtures for a reconciliation; the first to confess herself in error, and she did it so prettily and sweetly, and purred around Phil so like a loving kitten, that he thought the making up worth all the quarreling, and rather provoked the latter than tried to avoid it. Sometimes, when she was more than usually unreasonable and aggravating, Phil would absent himself from Hetherton Place for two or three days, knowing well that in the end Pierre would come to him with a note from Queenie begging him to return, and chiding him for his foolishness in laying to heart anything she had said. “You know I do not mean a word of it, and it’s just my awful temper which gets the mastery, and I think you hateful to bother me by staying away when you know how poky it is here without you,” she would write, and within an hour Phil would be at her side again, basking in the sunlight of her charms, and growing every day more and more infatuated with the girl, whose eyes were just as bright, and whose smile was just as sweet and alluring, when, later on, Mr. Beresford came, more in love, if possible, than Phil, but with a different way of showing it. Queenie was morally certain that he was either in love with her or would be soon; and she was always a little shy of him, and never allowed the conversation to approach anything like love-making; and if he praised a particular dress and said it was becoming, as he sometimes did, she never wore it again for him, but when she knew he was coming, donned some old-fashioned gown in which she fancied herself hideous. “If Mr. Beresford would be foolish, it should not be from any fault of hers,” she thought, never dreaming that if she arrayed herself in a bag he would still have thought her charming, provided her eyes and mouth were visible. Ostensibly Mr. Beresford’s relations with her were of a purely business nature; for in managing so large an estate there was much to be talked about, and Queenie would know everything, especially with regard to foreign matters.