“What?” asked Charlotte, severely.  “I am ashamed of you, Eddy.”

“I don’t see why papa don’t get a store, like him”—­he jerked an expressive shoulder towards the scent of the cigar smoke—­“and then we could have things as good as they do.”

But then Charlotte turned on him with fierceness none the less intense, although necessarily subdued.  “Eddy Carroll,” she whispered, with a long-drawn sibilance, “to turn on your father, a man like papa!  Eddy Carroll!  Poor papa does the best he can, always, always.”

“I suppose he does,” said Eddy, quite loudly.  “My, Charlotte, you needn’t act as if you were going to bite a feller.  I’ve had enough of—­”

“What?” asked Charlotte.

“Nothing,” said Eddy.  His arm was paining him quite severely.  It had been quite an ordeal for him to manage his knife and fork at supper without betrayal.

“What were you going to say?” persisted Charlotte.

“Nothing,” said Eddy, doggedly—­“nothing at all.  Don’t act so fierce, Charlotte.  It isn’t lady-like.  Amy never speaks so awful quick.”

Charlotte began putting on her hat, which had been left on the sitting-room table.  “I am ashamed of you,” she whispered again.  “I was ashamed of you all tea-time.”

Eddy whistled in a mannish fashion.  Charlotte continued adjusting her hat and smoothing her fluff of dark hair.  Her face, in the mirror which hung between the two front windows, looked not so angry as sorrowful, and with a dewy softness in the pretty eyes, and a slight quiver about the soft mouth.  Eddy glanced several times at this reflected face; then he stole, with a sudden, swift motion, up behind his sister, threw his arms around her neck, although it hurt him cruelly, and laid his boyish cheek against her soft, girlish one.

“No, you need not think that will make up,” whispered Charlotte.  But she herself pressed her cheek tenderly against his, and then laughed softly.  “Try not to do so again, dear,” she said.  “It mortified me, and it is not being a credit to papa.  Think a little and try to remember how you have been brought up.”

“Charlotte,” whispered Eddy, in the softest, most furtive of whispers, casting a glance over his shoulder.

“What is it, dear?”

“I suppose they”—­he indicated by a motion of his shoulder his host and hostess—­“are just as nice people as—­we are—­as the Carrolls.”

“Of course they are,” replied Charlotte, hastily.  She pushed Eddy away softly and began to fuss again with her hat.  “We must go home right away,” she said, “or they will worry.”

“There is no need of his going home with you, as long as I am here,” said Eddy.

“Of course not,” replied Charlotte.

But it seemed that Anderson himself had other views, and his mother also, for although a sudden and not altogether easy suspicion had come to her, she whispered aside to him that he must certainly accompany the two home.