“I did,” I answered him in just as blood-curdling a whisper, “but Uncle Pompey goes out to see after his hens just about this time every night.  I think that was the shadow.”

“Of course,” Tony laughed in a human voice again.  “Say Phyllis, you are one brick, a yard wide, all wool, and a foot thick.  There are not the usual bubble squeals in you.”  I never was so confused in all my life.  I don’t know how to answer people when they express a liking for me, because I have never had many compliments passed on me.

“Thank you, Tony,” I said, just as humbly as I felt, which was very humble indeed.

“Now, Phyllis, I wasn’t patting any Fido on the head,” Tony laughed in a funny way; for what I said had teased him, though I don’t know just why.  “And also I didn’t say that to you because you didn’t yelp when I scared up a bogie for you, but because I saw how you came near beating me to Roxy’s catastrophes this morning when Belle wanted to give her the jolly go-by.  Old Roxanny has some rough going at times, and it is good to know that she has got a bubble next door to stand by her in a stocking-darning way a fellow can’t.  Good-night!”

Tony Luttrell is an honorable gentleman, if he is just in short trousers yet, and I appreciate his friendship.

That shadow will make me uneasy.  I feel like that cross, nervous white hen of Uncle Pompey’s, only as if I were sitting on dynamite bottles instead of eggs.  I will and do trust my father, but can I trust him to trust Rogers?  Oh, I wish he was just a lawyer with almost no practice, like Tony’s father, and was sitting in the office all day long doing nothing, where I knew he was, instead of going back and forth from the city with other men that have more money than it is right to have!  I’d even be willing to have him keep the grocery store even if it did mean that he wasn’t quite as first-family as Judge Luttrell and the Byrds.

Oh, I do love my father—­I do—­I do!

CHAPTER IV

It does seem a pity that a person can’t put an Idol on a pedestal and keep it here without having it come down and bother around the house.  The idea of being introduced to Mr. Douglass Byrd and having to speak directly to him with my own voice has kept me miserable all this month in which I have been so perfectly happy being Roxanne’s friend and confidante, but it has happened and I’m glad it’s over, though it was under trying circumstances.

These are they.  My fears have come to pass and in this eventful month Lovelace Peyton has grown from a slender, frail little boy into almost as much of a roly-poly as Mamie Sue, and looks more like her than he does like Roxanne.  I try not to feed him more than four times a day extra, but he is stern with me about it.  Sometimes he will trade the cake I give him about four o’clock for a new shaped bottle, but lots of times he gets the bottle and the cake both away from me.  I just can’t be strong-minded with Lovelace Peyton, like I ought to be to make up for the way Roxanne forgets to see him from the rosy cloud.