The two girls raced down the stairs, passed Fayte in the hall; he looked around and called, “What’s the grand rush?” But they didn’t stop. Half way to the gate, Hilda caught up little Jinnie, who was playing, and hugged her tempestuously.
Five minutes later, Maybelle, returning from her errand, found the two of them sitting on the Bermuda grass, playing cat’s cradle. Maybelle whispered:
“I made her invite him. She wasn’t going to, but I told her he was an old friend of yours, and that your folks thought a great deal of him.”
“Oh, Maybelle—you oughtn’t to have said that last; it isn’t true.”
“Whiskerin’ secrets! Whiskerin’ secrets!” squealed Jinnie. “I hear you two girls whiskerin’ your secrets!”
“I thought that was what you said.” Maybelle’s face was as innocent as a pan of milk. “Anyhow—it’s done now. You just keep quiet—and it’ll work out all right.”
Hilda was quiet enough, outwardly; but she could never have told how she got through the day that followed. Yet she did get through it without actual betrayals.
Maybelle was in the kitchen, making tamales for to-morrow’s lunch. Hilda, at a desk, elbows on it to prop her face into studying position, had no realization of how time passed. She had drifted so far away from her surroundings that Miss Ferguson’s hesitating, embarrassed voice startled her, saying almost in Maybelle’s exact words:
“Hilda—what is it?”
“What is what?”