She mounted the steps to the back porch, tried the kitchen door, and found it locked. She went around to the door on the west side, opposite the gate, found that also secured upon the inside, and pa.s.sed grimly to the next.

"My grief! I didn't know any of these doors COULD be locked!" she muttered angrily. "They never have been before that I ever heard of."

She stopped before Evadna's window, and saw, through a slit in the green blind, that the old-fashioned bureau had been pulled close before it.

"My grief!" she whispered disgustedly, and retraced her steps to the east side, which, being next to the pond, was more secluded.

She surveyed dryly a window left wide open there, gathered her brown-and-white calico dress close about her plump person, and crawled grimly through into the sitting-room, where, to the distress of Phoebe's order-loving soul, the carpet was daily well-sanded with the tread of boys' boots fresh from outdoors, and where cigarette stubs decorated every window-sill, and the stale odor of Peaceful's pipe was never long absent.

She went first to all the outer rooms, and unlocked every one of the outraged doors which, unless in the uproar and excitement of racing, laughing boys pursuing one another all over the place with much slamming and good-natured threats of various sorts, had never before barred the way of any man, be he red or white, came he at noon or at midnight.

Evadna's door was barricaded, as Phoebe discovered when she turned the k.n.o.b and attempted to walk in. She gave the door an indignant push, and heard a m.u.f.fled shriek within, as if Evadna's head was buried under her pillow.

"My grief! A body'd think you expected to be killed and eaten," she called out unsympathetically. "You open this door! Vadnie Ramsey.

This is a nice way to act with my own boys, in my own house! A body'd think--"

There was the sound of something heavy being dragged laboriously away from the barricaded door; and in a minute a vividly blue eye appeared at a narrow crack.

"Oh, I don't see how you dare to L-LIVE in such a place, Aunt Phoebe!"

she cried tearfully, opening the door a bit wider. "Those Indians--and that awful man--"

"That was only Grant, honey. Let me in. There's a few things I want to say to you, Vadnie. You promised to help me teach my boys to be gentle--it's all they lack, and it takes gentle women, honey--"

"I am gentle," Evadna protested grievedly. "I've never once forgotten to be gentle and quiet, and I haven't done a thing to them--but they're horrid and rough, anyway--"

"Let me in, honey, and we'll talk it over. Something's got to be done.

If you wouldn't be so timid, and would make friends with them, instead of looking at them as if you expected them to murder you--I must say, Vadnie, you're a real temptation; they can't help scaring you when you go around acting as if you expected to be scared. You--you're TOO--" The door opened still wider, and she went in. "Now, the idea of a great girl like you hiding her head under a pillow just because Grant asked old Hagar to apologize!"

Evadna sat down upon the edge of the bed and stared unwinkingly at her aunt. "They don't apologize like that in New Jersey," she observed, with some resentment in her voice, and dabbed at her unbelievably blue eyes with a moist ball of handkerchief.

"I know they don't, honey." Phoebe patted her hand rea.s.suringly. "That's what I want you to help me teach my boys--to be real gentlemen. They're pure gold, every one of them; but I can't deny they're pretty rough on the outside sometimes. And I hope you will be--"

"Oh, I know. I understand perfectly. You just got me out here as a--a sort of sandpaper for your boys' manners!" Evadna choked over a little sob of self-pity. "I can just tell you one thing, Aunt Phoebe, that fellow you call Grant ought to be smoothed with one of those funny axes they hew logs with."

Phoebe bit her lips because she wanted to treat the subject very seriously. "I want you to promise me, honey, that you will be particularly nice to Grant; PARTICULARLY nice. He's so alone, and he's very proud and sensitive, because he feels his loneliness. No one understands him as I do--"

"I hate him!" gritted Evadna, in an emphatic whisper which her Aunt Phoebe thought it wise not to seem to hear.

Phoebe settled herself comfortably for a long talk. The murmur of her voice as she explained and comforted and advised came soothingly from the room, with now and then an interruption while she waited for a tardy answer to some question. Finally she rose and stood in the doorway, looking back at a huddled figure on the bed.

"Now dry your eyes and be a good girl, and remember what you've promised," she admonished kindly. "Aunt Phoebe didn't mean to scold you, honey; she only wants you to feel that you belong here, and she wants you to like her boys and have them like you. They've always wanted a sister to pet; and Aunt Phoebe is hoping you'll not disappoint her.

You'll try; won't you, Vadnie?"

"Y--yes," murmured Vadnie meekly from the pillow. "I know you will."

Phoebe looked at her for a moment longer rather wistfully, and turned away. "I do wish she had some s.p.u.n.k," she muttered complainingly, not thinking that Evadna might hear her. "She don't take after the Ramseys none--there wasn't anything mushy about them that I ever heard of."

"Mushy! MUSHY!" Evadna sat up and stared at nothing at all while she repeated the word under her breath. "She wants me to be gentle--she preached gentleness in her letters, and told how her boys need it, and then--she calls it being MUSHY!"

She reached mechanically for her hair-brush, and fumbled in a tumbled ma.s.s of shining, yellow hair quite as unbelievable in its way as were her eyes--Grant had shown a faculty for observing keenly when he called her a Christmas angel--and drew out a half-dozen hairpins, letting them slide from her lap to the floor. "MUSHY!" she repeated, and shook down her hair so that it framed her face and those eyes of hers. "I suppose that's what they all say behind my back. And how can a girl be nice WITHOUT being mushy?" She drew the brush meditatively through her hair. "I am scared to death of Indians," she admitted, with a.n.a.lytical frankness, "and tarantulas and snakes--but--MUSHY!"

Grant stood smoking in the doorway of the sitting-room, where he could look out upon the smooth waters of the pond darkening under the shade of the poplars and the bluff behind, when Evadna came out of her room. He glanced across at her, saw her hesitate, as if she were meditating a retreat, and gave his shoulders a twitch of tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt that she should be afraid of him. Then he stared out over the pond again. Evadna walked straight over to him.

"So you're that other savage whose manners I'm supposed to smooth, are you?" she asked abruptly, coming to a stop within three feet of him, and regarding him carefully, her hands clasped behind her.

"Please don't tease the animals," Grant returned, in the same impersonal tone which she had seen fit to employ--but his eyes turned for a sidelong glance at her, although he appeared to be watching the trout rise lazily to the insects skimming over the surface of the water.

"I'm supposed to be nice to you--par-TIC-ularly nice--because you need it most. I dare say you do, judging from what I've seen of you. At any rate, I've promised. But I just want you to understand that I'm not going to mean one single bit of it. I don't like you--I can't endure you!--and if I'm nice, it will just be because I've promised Aunt Phoebe. You're not to take my politeness at its face value, for back of it I shall dislike you all the time."

Grant's lips twitched, and there was a covert twinkle in his eyes, though he looked around him with elaborate surprise.

"It's early in the day for mosquitoes," he drawled; "but I was sure I heard one buzzing somewhere close."

"Aunt Phoebe ought to get a street roller to smooth your manners,"

Evadna observed pointedly.

"Instead it's as if she hung her picture of a Christmas angel up before the wolf's den, eh?" he suggested calmly, betraying his Indian blood in the unconsciously symbolic form of expression. "No doubt the wolf's nature will be greatly benefited--his teeth will be dulled for his prey, his voice softened for the nightcry--if he should ever, by chance, discover that the Christmas angel is there."

"I don't think he'll be long in making the discovery." The blue of Evadna's eyes darkened and darkened until they were almost black.

"Christmas angel,--well, I like that! Much you know about angels."

Grant turned his head indolently and regarded her.

"If it isn't a Christmas angel--they're always very blue and very golden, and pinky-whitey--if it isn't a Christmas angel, for the Lord's sake what is it?" He gave his head a slight shake, as if the problem was beyond his solving, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

"Oh, I could pinch you!" She gritted her teeth to prove she meant what she said.

"It says it could pinch me." Grant lazily addressed the trout. "I wonder why it didn't, then, when it was being squashed?"

"I just wish to goodness I had! Only I suppose Aunt Phoebe--"

"I do believe it's got a temper. I wonder, now, if it could be a LIVE angel?" Grant spoke to the softly swaying poplars.

"Oh, you--there now!" She made a swift little rush at him, nipped his biceps between a very small thumb and two fingers, and stood back, breathing quickly and regarding him in a shamed defiance. "I'll show you whether I'm alive!" she panted vindictively.

"It's alive, and it's a humming-bird. Angels don't pinch." Grant laid a finger upon his arm and drawled his solution of a trivial mystery.

"It mistook me for a honeysuckle, and gave me a peck to make sure."

He smiled indulgently, and exhaled a long wreath of smoke from his nostrils. "Dear little humming-birds--so simple and so harmless!"

"And I've promised to be nice to--THAT!" cried Evadna, in bitterness, and rushed past him to the porch.

Being a house built to shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed lightly upon her slippered feet.

"I hate you--hate you--HATE YOU!" she cried, her eyes blazing up at his amused face before she ran off among the trees.

"It sings a sweet little song," he taunted, and his laughter followed her mockingly as she fled from him into the shadows.

"What's the joke, Good Injun? Tell us, so we can laugh too." Wally and Jack hurried in from the kitchen and made for the doorway where he stood.

From under his straight, black brows Grant sent a keen glance into the shade of the grove, where, an instant before, had flickered the white of Evadna's dress. The shadows lay there quietly now, undisturbed by so much as a sleepy bird's fluttering wings.

"I was just thinking of the way I yanked that dog down into old Wolfbelly's camp," he said, though there was no tangible reason for lying to them. "Mister!" he added, his eyes still searching the shadows out there in the grove, "we certainly did go some!"