“Well!” he cried, “I never did expect to see you around this part of the country. But I told father I wanted to go back there to Malden next summer and see if I couldn’t come across you. And my mother wrote to a friend there about you, too. We all wanted to know who you were.”
“I—I am Nancy Nelson,” said the girl, timidly.
“Sure! Grace, or somebody, was just speaking of you,” said the boy. “You see, I was motoring through that country on the way to Chicago, in Senator Montgomery’s car. That was a pretty spot at that old mill and the girls saw the lilies. So I had to wade in for them—like a chump,” and he laughed.
“It was dangerous, I suppose,” confessed Nancy. “But I often longed to wade in myself for them.”
“And you got them anyway!” he cried, bursting into another laugh. “Grace and the others were sore about it. They had to wait until we got to the next town before we found any more lilies. Then I got a boat and went after them.”
Nancy had stopped skating, and she and the boy stood side by side, talking. What the Montgomery girl and her friends would think about this Nancy did not at the time imagine.
“But it’s funny Grace didn’t recognize you,” said Bob, suddenly.
“No. In the confusion they wouldn’t have noticed me very closely,” Nancy replied.
“Well! I don’t see how Grace could have missed knowing such a jolly girl as you.”
His boyish, outspoken opinion amused Nancy. Although Bob was at least three years her senior she soon became self-possessed. Girls are that way—usually.