“You must have worked awfully hard to get things ready for us, Dad.”

Patsy slipped an affectionately grateful hand into her father’s arm.

“I could have done better if I had known from the start that you were really coming,” he returned. “I had to hustle around considerably. At least you’re here now and your aunt can be depended upon to do the rest. I hope she will[50] get along nicely with her darkie help. They’re usually as hard to manage as a lot of unruly children.”

[50]

“Oh, she will,” predicted Patsy. “She always makes everybody except Patsy do as she says. Patsy likes to have her own way, you know.”

“So I’ve understood,” smiled Mr. Carroll. “Patsy usually gets it, too, I’m sorry to say.”

“You’re not a bit sorry and you know it,” flatly contradicted Patsy. “You’d hate to have me for a daughter if I were a meek, quiet Patsy who never had an opinion of her own.”

“I can’t imagine such a thing,” laughed her father. “I’m so used to being bullied by a certain self-willed young person that I rather like it.”

“You’re a dear,” gaily approved Patsy. “I don’t ever really bully you, you know. I just tell you what you have to do and then you go and do it. That’s not bullying, is it?”

“Not in our family,” satirically assured Mr. Carroll.

Whereupon they both laughed.

Meanwhile, as they continued to talk in the half-jesting, intimate fashion of two persons who thoroughly understand each other, the big black car ate up the miles that lay between Palm Beach and Las Golondrinas. As the party drew nearer[51] their destination the highly ornamental villas which had lined both sides of the road began to grow fewer and farther apart. They saw less of color and riotous bloom and more of the vivid but monotonous green of the tropics.

[51]

They turned at last from the main highway and due east into a white sandy road which ran through a natural park of stately green pines. Under the shadow of the pines the car continued for a mile or so, then broke out into the open and the sunlight again.

“Oh, look!”

Half rising in the seat, Patsy pointed. Ahead of them and dazzlingly 

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