“Well, Katherine Foster, how are you?” Jim was saying, wringing her hand heartily. “This is certainly fine. Bud and I walked over from Amherst to get some cider, but found there was none to be had. But meeting you people compensates for it all.”
“Oh, but there’s going to be some cider, too,” Katherine informed him; “that’s what we’re waiting for. The man is just finishing his dinner and he promised to come over and make some for us. I hope he’ll let us watch him—I never saw any cider made.”
“We’ll stick around.”
“Do—and maybe———”
“Well?”
“Maybe you’ll help us carry our jug home. It’s just inside the trees there.”
“I should say we will. It turns out to be mutually lucky that we met; we have the advantage of cider being made and you get your jug carried home. How’s Hampton anyway? Like it as well as you thought you would? Peggy has sent me a post-card now and then, but they all say the regulation thing: ‘Having a glorious time, the cross is our room,’ ‘Perfectly lovely up here, nice weather for ducks,’—you know the kind.”
Katherine laughed. She remembered the day she and Peggy had picked out a complete set of post-cards with Hampton views, and how they had been in the habit of dispatching them with the most bromidic messages they could think of, to their friend at Amherst.
“We just did it for fun,” she told him now. “We wanted to embarrass you before the other fellows by having a perfect flood of the usual type of post-cards coming in from a girls’ college. We thought you’d know. Why, we even signed them all sorts of different things—‘Essie,’ and ‘Jennie’ and ‘Millicent’ and——”
“And Marmalade,” added Jim with a twinkle in his eye. “I have them all, making a border around my room. The other boys are green with envy. They——”