‘Don’t stir, Mr. Crosby; I really beg you won’t. This is a rather _al-fresco_ entertainment, but I know you will excuse these wild children.’ Here the wild children gave way silently, convulsively. ‘It is the most charming entertainment I have been at for years,’ says Crosby pleasantly. ‘Where will you sit? Here?’ He is quite assiduous in his attentions, especially about the rug on which she is to sit—not his rug, at all events; Susan has half of that. ‘Thank you,’ says Miss Barry, ‘but I need not trouble you; I do not intend to stay. I merely came out to see if these remarkably ill-mannered young people were taking care of you.’ She speaks with a stiff and laboured smile upon her lips, but an evident determination to be amiable at all risks. ‘Won’t you have a cup of tea, Aunt Jemima?’ asks Susan timidly. ‘No, thank you, my love. Pray don’t trouble about me. I’—with a crushing glance at poor Susan—‘have no desire whatever to interfere with your amusement. I hope’—turning to Crosby—‘later on I may be able to see more of you, but to-day I am specially busy. I have many worries, Mr. Crosby, that are not exactly on the surface.’ ‘Like us all,’ says Crosby, nodding his head gravely. ‘Life is full of thorns.’ ‘Ah!’ says Miss Barry. She feels that she has now ‘impressed’ him indeed, and is satisfied. ‘We travel a thorny road,’ says she. Crosby sadly acquiesces. ‘True,’ says he. ‘Adieu,’ says she. She makes him an old-fashioned obeisance, and once again rounds the corner and disappears. ‘I don’t think it was very nice of you to make fun of her,’ says Susan reproachfully to Crosby. ‘Fun of her! What do you take me for?’ says he. ‘Make fun of your aunt because I said life was full of thorns? Well’—with argument looming in his eye—‘isn’t it?’ ‘Thorns?’ She pauses, as if wondering. ‘Oh no,’ says she. It seems a pity to disturb so sweet a faith; and Crosby, with a renunciatory wave of his hand, gives up the impending argument. ‘Awful lucky she went away so soon!’ says Carew, as the last bit of Aunt Jemima’s tail disappears round the corner. ‘She’d have led us a life had she stayed. She’s been on the prance all day on account of those Brians.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it awful?’ says Betty. ‘Who are the Brians?’ asks Crosby. ‘Farmers up on the hill over there’—pointing far away to the south. ‘Very well-to-do people, you know, with their sons going into the Church, and their daughters at a first-class school in Birmingham. Aunt Jemima, thinking to help them on their road to civilization, sent them a bath—one of the round flat ones, you know—as a present last month, hearing that they were expecting the girls home for their holidays, and—’ Here Betty breaks off, and goes into what she calls ‘kinks’ of laughter. ‘Well?’ says Crosby, naturally desirous of knowing where the laugh comes in.