"Oh, thank you!" answered Phil. "_Such_ condescension! _Such_ privileges! Your Royal Highness, I humbly make my bow!"
He bent low in a burlesque obeisance that a star actor might have envied, and, throwing up a saucer and catching it deftly, began to sing:
"The Queen of Hearts she made some tarts, Upon a summer day. But none could look--that selfish cook Drove every one away."
It was all the most idle nonsense, and yet, as they worked together in a playful half-quarrel, Lloyd liked him better than she had at any time before. He reminded her of Rob Moore. He was big like Rob, tall and broad-shouldered, but much handsomer. Rob had teased her since babyhood, and, when Phil began his banter in the same blunt, big-brother fashion, it made her feel as if she had known him always. And yet he was more like Malcolm than Rob, in some respects, she thought later. The courteous way he sprang to pick up her handkerchief, the quick turn he gave to some little remark, which made it a graceful compliment, his gentlemanly consideration for Mrs. Ware--all that was like Malcolm.
Phil would not be driven out of the kitchen until he had exacted a promise from Mrs. Ware that he might come the next day, and make the dessert for the morrow's dinner, vowing that, if it were not heels over head better than Lloyd's, he would treat everybody at the Wigwam and on the ranch to a picnic at Hole-in-the-rock.
"Prop the door open, please," called Joyce, as he went into the sitting-room from the kitchen. "I need some of that heat in here. It's chilly this morning when one sits still."
So Lloyd, moving back and forth at her pastry-making, could see their heads bending over the table, and hear snatches of an animated discussion about a design he proposed for her to put on one of the programmes.
"Put a line from 'Call me thine own' on this one," he said, "and have a couple of turtle-doves perched up on the clef, cooing at each other, and make little hearts for the notes."
"How brilliant!" cried Joyce. "Phil, you're a genius. Do think up some more, for I'm nearly at my wits' end, trying to get thirty different designs."
"Don't make them all so fine," he suggested. "Some of those people will get it into their heads that matrimony is all roses." He lifted his voice a little, so that Lloyd could not fail to hear. She was standing before the moulding-board now, her sleeves tucked up, and a look of intense seriousness on her face as she sifted flour, as if pie-making were the most important business in the universe.