“I cert’nly won’t!” her hostess promised, and, turning inhospitably to the two callers, “What on earth you want around here?” she inquired.

Herbert chivalrously took upon himself the duty of response.  “Look here; this is my own aunt and uncle’s yard, isn’t it?  I guess if I want to come in it I got a perfect right to.”

“I should say so,” his partner said warmly.

“Why, of course!” the cordial Patty agreed.  “We can play some nice Sunday games, or something.  Let’s sit on the porch steps and think what to do.”

“I just as soon,” said Henry Rooter. “I got nothin’ p’ticular to do.”

“I haven’t either,” said Herbert.

Thereupon, Patty sat between them on the steps.

“This is per-feckly grand!” she cried.  “Come on, Florence, aren’t you going to sit down with all the rest of us?”

“Well, pray kindly excuse me!” said Miss Atwater; and she added that she would neither sit on the same steps with Herbert Atwater and Henry Rooter, nor, even if they entreated her with accompanying genuflections, would she have anything else whatever to do with them.  She concluded with a reference to the oldest pair of shoes she might ever come to possess; and withdrew to the railing of the veranda at a point farthest from the steps; and, seated there, swinging one foot rhythmically, she sang hymns in a tone at once plaintive and inimical.

It was not lost upon her, however, that her withdrawal had little effect upon her guests.  They chattered gaily, and Patty devised, or remembered, harmless little games that could be played by a few people as well as by many; and the three participants were so congenial and noisy and made so merry, that before long Florence was unable to avoid the impression that whether she liked it or not she was giving quite a party.

At times the noted eyes of Atwater & Rooter were gentled o’er with the soft cast of enchantment, especially when Patty felt called upon to reprove the two with little coquetries of slaps and pushes.  Noted for her sprightliness, she was never sprightlier; her pretty laughter tooted continuously, and the gentlemen accompanied it with doting sounds so repulsive to Florence that without being actively conscious of what she did, she embodied the phrase, “perfeckly sickening,” in the hymn she was crooning, and repeated it over and over to the air of “Rock of Ages.”

“Now I tell you what let’s play,” the versatile Patty proposed, after exhausting the pleasures of “Geography,” “Ghosts” and other tests of intellect.  “Let’s play ‘Truth.’  We’ll each take a piece o’ paper and a pencil, and then each of us asks the other one some question, and we haf to write down the answer and sign your name and fold it up so nobody can see it except the one that asked the question, and we haf to keep it a secret and never tell as long as we live.”

“All right,” said Henry Rooter.  “I’ll be the one to ask you a question, Patty.”