“There’s a telephone out to the place,” he suggested.  “I could easily let them know if I missed my train, and I could easily miss it—­if my invitation were pressing enough.”

“Then do miss it,” she insisted, smiling up at him so cordially that he laughed and said in a complacent tone, “We’ll consider it done.  I’ll telephone Eugenia from the station, that I’ll not be out till morning.  Really,” he added a moment later, “it will be more like a sure-enough home-coming to come back to you and that little chatterbox of a Mary than to go out to my brother’s.  Eugenia is a dear, but I’ve never known her except as a bride or a dignified young matron, so of course we have no youthful experiences in common to hark back to together.  That is the very back-bone of a family reunion in my opinion.  Now that year in Arizona, when you all took me in as one of yourselves, is about all that I can remember of real home-life, and somehow, when I think of home, it is the Wigwam that I see, and the good cheer and the jolly times that I always found there.”

Joyce looked up again, touched and pleased.  “I’m so glad that you feel that way, for we always count you in, right after Jack and the little boys.  Mamma always speaks of you as ‘my other’ boy, and as for Mary, she quotes you on all occasions, and thinks you are very near perfection.  She is going to be so delighted when she sees you, that I’d not be a bit surprised if she should jump up and down and squeal, right in the station.”

The mention of this old habit of Mary’s brought up to each of them the mental picture of the child, as she had looked on various occasions when her unbounded pleasure was forced to find expression in that way.  In the year that Joyce had been away from her she had been in her thoughts oftener as that quaint little creature of eight, than the sixteen-year old school girl she had grown into.

Phil, too, accustomed to thinking of Mary as he had known her at the Wigwam, could hardly believe he saw aright, when the train pulled in and she flew down the steps to throw her arms around Joyce.  It was the same, lovable, eager little face that looked up into his, the same impetuous unspoiled child, yet a second glance left him puzzled.  There was some intangible change he could not label, and it interested him to try to analyze it.

She was taller, of course, almost as tall as Joyce, with skirts almost as long, but it was not that which impressed him with the sense of change.  It was a certain girlish winsomeness, something elusive, which cannot be defined, but which lends a charm like nothing else in all the world to the sweet unfolding of early maidenhood.