“Yes. I think you are snubbing Larry.”
“I have no time for boys,” responded Beth.
“Boys! No less!”
“Larry is a boy to me,” Beth declared, in her very haughtiest way.
“I don’t care,” said Ella, mischievously. “He is beginning to come to me for comfort when you throw him down.”
It really did seem as though Larry Haven was striving to show Beth that he had not lost his interest in her or in her career. When Beth first came home that second summer, Larry was frequently at the Baldwin cottage. Whether Beth actually snubbed him, or not, as Ella said, he disappeared soon after, going away for a long outing with Mrs. Haven; so the Baldwins did not see him again until Beth had gone back to Rivercliff in September.
Rather to Beth’s surprise, Larry wrote to her soon after she reached school—something he had not done for fully a year and a half. The letter sounded just as though their old intimacy had never been broken, and that the young lawyer was still quite as much her friend and well-wisher as ever.
She was, for some time, undecided whether to answer or not, and how to answer. But finally she replied in a pleasant, brief letter. Larry’s epistle was like himself—exuberant:
“The Mater lugged me around from one watering place to another this summer—there was no getting away from her, poor dear!—and kept me at it so late that you had flitted from the home nest on Bemis Street when I got back to Hudsonvale and my clamoring clients. I never go away on a vacation without expecting to find the heaped-up bodies of exhausted and desperate clients before my office door in the Hudsonvale Block. However, all I found were several insistent roaches from the bakery downstairs and heaps of dust, for I declare, Devine had not been in to clean up for a month!
“What I started to tell you about, Beth, was a girl I met at Saratoga. Fact is, it was the second time I had met her. I am almost tempted to declare it was the third. I spoke to you once of Miss Emeline Freylinghausen. Do you remember the girl who passed me coming out of Rivercliff School when I was going in the day I called to see you? Do you remember her? You said she was a servant, just discharged.