ng. It was all too much for me, and I laughed--laughed from the
lower ribs!

Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms
tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug!

"Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun--all of
us--together--now we can _talk_!"

VI

The following evening, after dinner, Maltby Phar, still a little ruffled
by Susan's unexpected vivacities of the night before, retired to the
library with pipe and book, and Susan and I sat alone together on the
garden terrace. It was dusk. The heavy air of the past week had been
quickened and purified by an afternoon thunderstorm. Little cool puffs
came to us across a bed of glimmering white phlox, bearing with them its
peculiar, loamy fragrance. Smoke from my excellent cigarette eddied now
and then toward Susan.

Silence had stolen upon her as the afterglow faded, revealing the first
patient stars. Already I had learned to respect Susan's silences. She
was not, in the usual sense of uncertain temper, of nervous
irritability, a moody child; yet she had her moods--moods, if I may put
it so, of extraordinary definition. There were hours, not too frequent
to be disturbing, when she _withdrew_; there is no better word for it.
At such times her thin, alert little frame was motionless; she would sit
as if holding a pose for a portrait, her chin a trifle lifted, her eyes
focusing on no visible object, her hands lying--always with the palms
upward--in her lap. I supposed that now, with the veiled yet sharply
scented dusk, such a mood had crept upon her. But for once I was
mistaken. Susan, this time, had not withdrawn; she was intensely aware.

"Ambo"--the suddenness with which she spoke startled me--"you ought to
have lots of children. You ought to have a boy, anyway; not just a
girl."

"A boy? Why, dear? Are you lonely?"

"Of course not; with you--and Phil!"

"Then whatever in the world put such a crazy----"

Susan interrupted; a bad habit of hers, never subsequently broken, and
due, doubtless, to an instinctive impatience of foreseeable remarks.

"You're so awfully rich, Ambo. You could have dozens and not feel
it--except that they'd get in your way sometimes and make your outside
cross. But two wouldn't be much more trouble than one. It might seem a
little crowded--at first; but after while, Ambo, you'd hardly notice
it."

"Possibly. Still--nice boys don't grow on bushes, Susan. Not the kind of
brothers