“No,” she said slowly, “but I know her quite well.”
“Ah! I’m glad of that,” said the young man, boldly and cheerfully. “Now I feel quite as if I had been properly introduced! ‘Les amis de nos amis,’ you know!”
The girl smiled back at him. “I am Miss Brent. By the way, your sister has the distinction of being the only Allardyce in college. It’s a rather unusual name.”
“Yes,” assented Allardyce, delightedly. “Scotch, you know.” And then in a sudden burst of confidence—“My people were Scotch and French. I have been educated abroad and have come home for the law course at the University. Awfully glad to be in America again, too, for, after all, I am an American through and through.” He pulled himself up sharply in some confusion and amusement at his unusual loquacity.
But the girl before him did not seem to find it strange, and was quite interested and politely attentive.
“And where is your sister?” she demanded.
“Oh, that’s the essential, and I forgot to mention it,” he replied, laughing a little and digging his stick into the soft earth. “She’s gone off walking!” and then he went on insinuatingly and plaintively—“And I don’t know a soul here—never was here before in my life—and there’s no train to Boston, and I have to wait two hours for her!”
The young woman smiled sympathetically. “That’s too bad,” she said, and then she looked doubtfully at Allardyce. He seemed very young and to be having a rather bad time of it, and there is an unwritten law at the college which constitutes every member of it the natural protector and entertainer of lost or bored strangers.
“I am going across the lake for water-lilies,” she went on after a little hesitation. “If you care to come you may, and pull me about while I gather them. It is hard work to do it alone.”
“You are very kind,” said Allardyce promptly, “and it is very nice of you to put it that way. It will be a great favor to me to let me go.”