“No, you didn’t!” sharply contradicted Lelia.  “You never liked anybody but yourself and your dear, lovely Rosy!”

“I say I did!” stoutly declared Bess.  “I liked Phil before I was born.”

And she nodded her little head complacently, as if this last were a clincher that no one—­not even Lelia—­could have the hardihood to doubt.

Phil burst out laughing, and Lelia flung down the book she was reading, or trying lo read, when Bess began her marvelous “snake-story,” and stared at her cousin in speechless disgust.

“I never did see such behaviors as those,” said Bess, with awful gravity and a marked consideration for the English language not common to her.

“Such behaviors as those!” repeated Lelia, with peppery sarcasm.  “My goodness, Bess, how finely you talk, and how truthful you are this afternoon!”

“You shan’t scorn at me,” sturdily retorted Bess.  “I will cry if you do, and then Phil will take my part, and won’t like you one bit.”

“As if I cared for your crying, or your being ‘scorned at,’ or Phil’s not liking me!”

And Lelia sailed out of the room, crossed the piazza and ran down the japonica-bordered path to the garden.

Seating herself under a crape-myrtle tree, its pink blossoms glowing amid the deep, glossy green of its leaves, like the blush of the sunset on an April cloud, she rested her chin in the palm of her hand, and looked, half-thoughtfully, half-defiantly, at the ground.

So Phil was not going to return to Oakdale; he did not care for any of his old friends; and this was gratitude.  Yet what had he to be grateful for?  The debt was all on her side, and the affection, too, for that matter; and the one, she thought, ought to balance the other.

“Lelia!”

Phil had contrived to elude Bess’ fox-like vigilance, and when she was busy with her tea-set, followed Lelia into the garden, to try and find out what it was that had so mightily offended his old playmate.

“Well?” she said, shortly.

“I’ve something to give you,” Phil began, in a business-like tone—­“not to give you, exactly, but to return to you.”

And he put in her hand the identical little white envelope she had given him at Oakdale the evening before their departure for Florida.

It was worn and soiled, and all its former freshness gone; but it contained five crisp ten-dollar notes, every penny of Phil’s small earnings since he had been in Mr. Herdic’s employ, and “squared accounts between them,” as he said, with a satisfied smile.

Lelia was in one of her grand, womanly moods, and seemed to put her childhood and childhood’s tempers and jealousies away from her as one might an outgrown garment.

She looked as she did the day she had urged her uncle to befriend Oakdale’s “bad boy,” and her hand closed over the envelope in a slow, proud way, as if she hated, yet strangely valued, the few poor bank-notes it held, hoarded, she knew, with so much self-denial and miserly care, that “accounts might be squared between them,” and Phil no longer her debtor.