Marjory laughed. "And what about my wide mouth, and my long nose crooked at the point?"
"Well," admitted Blanche, "your mouth may be large, but it is a nice shape, and your lips are beautifully red, and your nose is really only a very tiny bit crooked; and so, Miss Marjory," triumphantly, "there's no reason at all why you should be allowed to use boys' words if I mustn't."
"I don't really know many; you see, I've hardly spoken to any boys except the Morisons."
"It does seem queer to think that you have lived in great big London and know all about it, while I have never been farther away than Morristown."
"Perhaps you'll come to London with us some day. Wouldn't it be fun? I wonder how you would feel."
Marjory thought over this conversation as she rode down the hill towards Braeside. She sometimes longed to go away and see something of that great world she had begun to realize of late. Her lessons were enlarging her ideas. Geography fired her imagination with its tales of far countries--their tropical beauty, or, it might be, their ice-bound grandeur, High mountains, terrible volcanoes, placid lakes, swift-flowing rivers--all these spoke to her of a wonderful world outside her own; and she longed to spread her wings and to fly out and away into its vastness. She often wondered how her uncle, who knew about all these things, could be content to stay year in and year out in one place, spending nearly all his time within the four walls of his own study, and her heart would go out to that unknown father of hers with his roving disposition; how well she could understand it! She would weave romances, with him as hero and herself as heroine--romances which always had the same happy ending; and then she would finish up by wondering if she would ever see him, and whether he would be the least bit like her pictures of him.
Marjory's thoughts wandered back to the man, and the mystery surrounding his appearance and disappearance. What did the woman mean by "_halibi_"? She supposed it must be a slang word, so it would be no use looking in a dictionary; perhaps it meant pretence.
She reached Braeside just as Blanche's pony was being taken round to the door by the groom, and to her surprise Alan Morison was there too, mounted on a horse which was rather too big for him. He rode towards Marjory with a somewhat sheepish expression on his face.