Clare laughed. “Why, Petra! You never told me you and Doctor Pryne had mutual friends! Teresa—?”

“Yes. Teresa Kerr.” Lewis spoke shortly, dryly, because of his complete astonishment at Petra’s ill-concealed panic.

“Oh!” Clare remembered. Suddenly, it seemed. “That must have been the maid. Petra, I wonder what has become of Teresa? You were David and Jonathan once, you two. You were a funny child, my dear, when I first knew you in Cambridge—and so beautifully democratic! But I’m afraid we can’t tell you anything about the girl, Doctor Pryne. The whereabouts of vanished domestics is as much a problem as that of all safety pins. Richard! Do you remember Felix Fairfax, our inimitable butler! I wonder what has become of him! My husband made me get rid of him, Doctor Pryne, because he helped himself to one of my photographs and had it in his room. I wrote him a recommendation that was a marvel, though. Anybody who couldn’t read between the lines deserved what they got....”

Petra, who until this moment had tasted nothing, now took up her cold cup of tea and drank thirstily, while Dick and Clare became mildly hilarious over a growing volume of anecdotes concerning the inimitable Felix Fairfax, the flirtatious, vanished and banished butler, whom Lewis’ question about Teresa had brought to mind.

Lewis was silent. He was not looking at Petra, but he knew instinctively when she lost her strange, inexplicable fear, and relaxed. A baby, with a pretty young nurse in its wake, was running down the lawn, toward the tea table. Petra had been the first to notice the invasion and welcomed the diversion it brought. Then Clare, following Petra’s eyes, saw the baby.

“Little Sophia!” she cried, quickly on her feet, while anecdotes of Felix Fairfax hung broken off in mid-air. She ran forward a few steps and knelt on the grass, her arms spread wide to receive her little daughter. In that gracious moment Clare was like nothing in the world but a dancing Greek figure on some lovely old vase—all quicksilver, grace and charm. Dick’s face glowed appreciatively. Even Lewis, for that minute, was aware of Clare’s loveliness.

The baby, however, made a swooping detour to avoid the wide-flung, slender arms of the kneeling mother and plunged straight for Petra, her big half-sister. Petra held her off, at arm’s length. “You’ve been in the brook. You’re dirty. You’re muddy. Don’t touch my dress. No!”

The rebuffed cherub commenced to wail but Petra did not relent and draw her into her arms. “No! No!” She repeated it. “Mustn’t spoil Petra’s beautiful, clean dress. No. I’m not going to pick you up.”

Then Clare swept down upon them and snatched the baby up. Two muddy palms immediately made their mark on the shoulders of her white frock. But she lifted the delicious little hands and kissed them, one after the other, gravely—delicately. Her eyes, over the baby’s golden head, looked at Petra now with healthy, open accusation, and she held the delicious little body more and more tightly to her, while small wet shoes muddied her skirt.

Clare, looking away from Petra at last, met Doctor Pryne’s puzzled eyes. “I’m going to take little Sophia up to the nursery, if you’ll excuse me for only a few minutes,” she said. “Anyway, I wanted you to see our guest house—the view at its back. You get the river there. Petra will show you. And this is a good time—before Lowell comes along.—Richard, you may come up with us and see what a nice supper a nice cook has sent up to a nice nursery for an adorable baby! Only first we’ll help a nice nurse to wash these precious, dirty paws.... No, Richard, I want to carry her myself. Truly. You don’t mind, Doctor? I always run up to the nursery at little Sophia’s supper time, even in the middle of quite formal parties. But it only takes a few minutes.”

Her eyes, on Lewis’, were replete with meaning. “Now is your time,” they said. “Do make a beginning at helping me understand this strange girl. You can’t deny she is lacking in normal responses. Help me!”

“Good-by, sister,” Petra murmured, and went near enough to lay her cheek for just a breath against her little sister’s hair. “I couldn’t let you spoil my pretty dress, honey. But I do love you!”

At this belated gesture, Clare’s beseeching look at Lewis transformed itself to one of ironic amusement.

“If you are really interested in the view, Doctor Pryne, it’s across the road. We can go through the kitchen garden. That is shorter than going back through the house.”

The kitchen garden, through which Petra led him, was a jungle of drooping, white-starred blackberry canes. They came out of it through a little wicket gate and crossed the intimate, idle road to the guest house opposite.

“Clare won’t let them cut the grass here,” Petra explained. “Any objection to wading?” Lewis had none and followed the girl around the side of the little house and came to an uncovered piazza at the back. Ignoring the several chairs arranged with an eye to the view there, they sat down side by side on the edge of the piazza boards. From under their feet wide sweeps of June fields surged away in many-colored rippling waves. White and yellow daisies, red and white clovers, golden buttercups, orange devil’s-paintbrush, and sparkling sun-soaked grass dazzled Lewis’ eyes against the view of river and blue hills beyond.

“Paradise will be a June field like this,” he thought, “with the saints reunioning while the angels dance.” He was thinking of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment,” the detail of the left corner.—“Petra and I seem to have arrived somewhat ahead of time, though,—and, God knows, without our crowns! This girl! She is a breaker of promises, a vain poser, a liar, a traitor to friendship, and a repulser of innocent babyhood. Clare made her do her paces. Just didn’t she, though!”

But his next thought was more like shock than thought. “Why need her hands be as lovely as her face? Or is this Paradise!” They were clasped about her knees, strong, sun-tanned hands, with long, squarish-tipped fingers. Angelic hands!

Lewis remarked, “It’s nice here.”

Petra agreed, “Yes, isn’t it!”

Lewis lighted a cigarette and Petra pulled a grass blade to make a bracelet, bending forward from lithe hips.

“You thought I was horrid to my baby sister, didn’t you, Doctor Pryne?” she asked bluntly. “I wasn’t, not really. But I couldn’t let her spoil my dress, could I? This is the first time I’ve worn it. It would have to be dry-cleaned if I had picked her up. And things are never so nice again after they are dry-cleaned. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

The dress she had so ruthlessly protected against a bewitching baby was smooth silk, the color of heavy cream. Its only decoration was a flight of embroidered gold and brown bees. They flew up one full sleeve from wristband to shoulder, across the back of the neck and down the other body-side of the frock to the lower edge of the hem. It was—taken by itself—a lovely frock, and if it had not been so utterly Petra’s own, belonged so completely to her shapely young body and coloring, even Lewis—no connoisseur in women’s clothes—would have noticed its lovely detail before this.

Petra dropped her grass bracelet—half made—into the grass and picked up the hem of her skirt, folding it back. “Look,” she said, “how beautifully finished it is.”

The flight of bees had been carried on, in all its careful perfection, to the upper edge of the hem on its inner side, where it would never show. It was as if the embroiderer had loved her work too well to realize when she had done enough.

“Clare’s dress was nothing at all,” Petra was saying. “It didn’t matter what little Sophia did to it. Besides, if Clare ruined a dozen dresses, it wouldn’t matter. She could buy dozens more.... So it wasn’t fair, was it?”

“No. It was hardly fair,” Lewis agreed absently.

Petra jumped up. The bee-embroidered hem of her skirt brushed through the flowers in the deep grass. She came closer to Lewis, stood there before him in the long grass.

“Could you spare me a cigarette?” she asked.

She had not smoked at the tea table and Lewis had taken it for granted she was that rare thing, a modern girl who did not smoke. Apologetically, he offered her his opened cigarette case and struck a match for her on the piazza boards. (The grateful patient should have given Lewis a lighter along with the case!) But he might as well have kissed her as have held the light for her,—with his face like that. Even before the girl saw Lewis’ face, she felt what was there for her to see. Her eyelids swept up, to verify her suddenly alert instinct, and for just that instant blue reticence, under Lewis’ own startled eyes, leapt into blue flame.... Petra drew a little away, trying to smile and utterly failing. Lewis lighted a fresh cigarette for himself.

Petra puffed at hers for a minute only and then it went the way the bracelet had gone, only she bent to press out the spark—firmly, securely—into damp grass roots. Returning to her place, she clasped her hands around her knees again and explained.

“Really I don’t know how to smoke, not gracefully. You shouldn’t have watched me! You made me feel hypocritical, watching me like that. But I do smoke, sometimes. Almost every night. One or two cigarettes after dinner with Father. So I wasn’t pretending, you see....”

She went on, after a minute, “You asked me about Teresa, remember? I’ll tell you now. I couldn’t say a word with Clare listening. But Clare lied about her. She knows perfectly well that Teresa wasn’t our maid—not in the sense that that Fairfax person was Clare’s butler, I mean. Teresa was nothing in the world but our guardian angel,—father’s, Marian’s, and mine. And she is my best friend.”

Lewis said coolly, “Yes, of course! I knew that. I saw that it was so, that afternoon in Cambridge. And when Mrs. Farwell said that Teresa was gone out of your life like a lost safety pin I knew it couldn’t be true. But why did she say it? And why did you let her say it?”

“Oh, Clare wasn’t lying when she said that. She thought, I mean, that it was true enough. It was in saying Teresa was our maid, putting her with Felix Fairfax,—that was the lie. But so far as Clare knows, Teresa is gone—just as absolutely as any disappearing safety pin. I wish I were as elusive,—that Clare had mislaid me too. But she has a use for me. She thinks she has, anyway, and she actually pays me a wage of two thousand dollars a year to live here at Green Doors and be a model stepdaughter.”—Petra flashed a defiant look at Lewis and added, “I’m different from Clare’s other servants, you see. I don’t adore her!”

The girl’s hands, Lewis noticed, were no longer clasping her knees. They were gripping them. But he gave no sign that he was conscious of her anger and her rebellion.

“Will you just listen to that bird,” he said. “Bobolinks are usually cheerful, of course. But this fellow is carrying it beyond reason, it seems to me! He might have a peephole into heaven,—the way he sounds.” For a bobolink, apparently beside himself with rapture, was circling and swooping, swooping and circling, singing his jetty little throat to bursting. His nest must be hidden somewhere in the grass not a dozen yards from where they sat on the piazza’s edge.

Petra tilted her head to see the speck of song against the sunlight. She stayed silent until the rapture ended and the heaven-glimpser sank home. She even waited a minute or two beyond that sudden silence before she said, but calmly now, her twined fingers relaxing their grip, “My friend, Teresa, is like that bobolink’s song. At least, she’s as happy as that. Jolly as that. I’ll tell you about her, Doctor Pryne. I am glad that you think of us together. I adore her, of course. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she lived there till she was fifteen. Her father and mother kept a day school for boys. But Teresa had four sisters and they all went to the boys’ school. There were three brothers. Eight children in Teresa’s family, you see....”