"That's them now," whispered the young man, forgetting for the moment his scholastic training. "That's Robin and Miss Deane, with the book and the basket of toadstools."
The couple ahead stopped just then and turned. Frank prepared himself for the worst.
But Mr. Weatherby would seem to have been unduly alarmed. As he stepped from the vehicle Constance came forward with extended hand.
"You are good to surprise us," she was saying, and then, a moment later, "Mr. Weatherby, this is Mr. Robin Farnham—a friend of my childhood. I think I have mentioned him to you."
Whatever momentary hostility Frank Weatherby may have cherished for Robin Farnham vanished as the two clasped hands. Frank found himself looking into a countenance at once manly, intellectual and handsome—the sort of a face that men, and women, too, trust on sight. And then for some reason there flashed again across his mind a vivid picture of Constance as she had looked up at him that wet night under the umbrella, the raindrops glistening on her cheek and in the blowy tangle about her temples. He held Robin's firm hand for a moment in his rather soft palm. There was a sort of magnetic stimulus in that muscular grip and hardened flesh. It was so evidently the hand of achievement, Frank was loath to let it go.
"You are in some way familiar to me," he said then. "I may have seen you when I was up this way ten years ago. I suppose you do not recall anything of the kind?"
A touch of color showed through the brown of Robin's cheek.
"No," he said; "I was a boy of eleven, then, probably in the field. I don't think you saw me. Those were the days when I knew Miss Deane. I used to carry baskets of green corn over to Mr. Deane's camp. If you had been up this way during the past five or six years I might have been your guide. Winters I have attended school."
They were walking slowly as they talked, following the hack toward the Lodge. Constance took up the tale at this point, her cheeks also flushing a little as she spoke.
"He had to work very hard," she said. "He had to raise the corn and then carry it every day—miles and miles. Then he used to make toy boats and sail them for me in the brook, and a playhouse, and whatever I wanted. Of course, I did not consider that I was taking his time, or how hard it all was for him."