“Why, Tommy, you’re not so smart!” laughed his sister. “It takes Ruth to find gas stations. We were stalled right in front of one, and you did not know it. Hop in here and take my place and I’ll run back to the other car. Ruth will tell you all about it.”
“Perhaps we had better let Colonel Marchand and Jennie have this honeymoon car,” Ruth said doubtfully.
“Humph!” her chum observed, “I begin to believe it will be just as much a honeymoon car with you and Tom in it as with that other couple. ‘Bless you, my children!’”
She ran back to the big car with this saucy statement. Tom grinned, slipped behind the wheel, and started the roadster slowly.
“It must be,” he observed in his inimitable drawl, “that Sis has noticed that I’m fond of you, Ruthie.”
“Quite remarkable,” she rejoined cheerfully. “But the war isn’t over yet, Tommy-boy. And if our lives are spared we’ve got to finish our educations and all that. Why, Tommy, you are scarcely out of short pants, and I’ve only begun to put my hair up.”
“Jimminy!” he grumbled, “you do take all the starch out of a fellow. Now tell me how you got gas. What happened?”
Everybody has been to Boston, or expects to go there some time, so it is quite immaterial what happened to the party while at the Hub. They only remained two days, anyway, then they started off alongshore through the pleasant old towns that dot the coast as far as Cape Ann.
They saw the ancient fishing ports of Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester and Rockport, and then came back into the interior and did not see salt water again until they reached Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimac.
The weather remained delightfully cool and sunshiny after that heavy tempest they had suffered in the hills, and they reached Portsmouth and remained at a hotel for three days when it rained again. The young folks chafed at this delay, but Aunt Kate declared that a hotel room was restful after jouncing over all sorts of roads for so long.