Disagreeability has a kind of force that knocks one down before pleasantness hardly gets to him.  I knew Roxanne said something in answer to that; in my heart I knew, but I couldn’t hear what it was with my ears.

“Well,” came Mamie Sue’s voice, muffled through a piece of fudge she always carries in her pocket, in case she goes a square away from home and is overtaken by her appetite.  She always has enough for everybody else, too, I must not forget to add.  “Well, if it is Miss Prissy’s robber come back, that makes the boys act so, Phyllis might just as well be scared as the rest of us; and if it is something pleasant, why, let her have a share of that, too.”  Some day I’m going-to break loose from myself and hug Mamie Sue’s funny fatness until she squeals.

“I don’t believe that if it was just a frolic the boys would have got Douglass to come away from his work to the Crotch; but maybe he was going up-town anyway, and they knew that,” said Roxanne as I came in the door and was given welcomes of different degrees.  The tall Willis is getting so that she moves over for me to sit down by her, even if she is just sitting on one small chair.  I wish she could know how that pleases me.

“Did the boys look to you as if the thing that is making them all act so important was nice or disagreeable, Phyllis?” asked Roxanne as she got out the inevitable darning bag.

The short Willis moved nearer and began to help sort and get ready for patching.  I always keep a thimble in Roxanne’s darning bag now, but sometimes the short girl beats me to it.  The others never notice that Roxanne’s hands are never empty of patching jobs.  Still Mamie Sue does attentively feed her fudge in hunks while she darns.

“I don’t know boys well enough to diagram their expressions,” I answered.  “They always look excited and queer to me, and I can’t tell their jokes from their other affairs.  What have they been doing?”

“Being as hateful and secret as they know how to be,” answered Belle crossly.  “Boys are nothing but rough, rude miseries; and the next time Tony Luttrell tells me to ‘bubble along’ as he did Mamie Sue and me, when Mamie Sue only wanted to stop him to give him a piece of fudge, I am going to tell him what I think of him.”

“Hope I’ll be there,” said the tall Willis behind my shoulder, and I never enjoyed a silent remark more.  Belle is as afraid of Tony’s laugh as she is of a cow in the lane.

“Now I know that something awful has happened or is coming if Tony spoke that way,” said Roxanne, with such anxiety coming into her face that the timid Willis dropped her stocking and Mamie Sue gulped down such a large piece of candy that she almost had to choke.  “Oh, girls, do you suppose that dreadful man has got out of jail in the city and is coming back to maybe—­maybe—?”

But the words were stopped in Roxanne’s mouth with a great, pleasant laugh as the Idol stood in the door.  You would know that “Idol” is the name for him by the way all the girls look awed and afraid of him, but interested too.  Tony and Pink and Sam were in the background like the angels in the picture of Sir Galahad.