"That old tale seems to worry you a lot, Lloyd."
"It does," she confessed. "I've thought about it every day this wintah. Now this is all ready for the salt and buttah," she added as the last grain in the wire cage burst into snowy bloom. "I'll take it ovah to the old gentlemen while it's hot. You can be popping the next lot while I'm gone."
Mrs. Sherman joined them presently, and the question of costumes was settled. "There's no use of yoah going to any expense for one," said Lloyd, with her usual delicate consideration. "There are trunkfuls of lovely things still in the attic. Come ovah next week and we'll look through them."
So it came to pass that the old intimacy was, in a measure, resumed, for several calls were necessary to complete the arrangements for Valentine night. That those arrangements were highly satisfactory might have been inferred from the account of the affair which appeared in the Society columns next day, in which Miss Sherman and Mr. Rob Moore were awarded the palm for the most unique and striking costumes. They had gone as Bluebeard and his beautiful Fatima. It was the crowning good time of the season, Lloyd declared, for Rob under cover of his disguise entered into the spirit of the occasion with all his old zest, and when Rob tried, nobody could be better company than he. After that he fell into the way of an occasional call at The Locusts. He was too busy to spare many evenings, but when Lloyd came back to the Valley, nearly every Sunday afternoon was spent in their old way, taking long tramps together through the quiet country lanes and winter woods.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MIRACLE OF BLOSSOMING
The beginning of Lent was the end of all the social gaieties and most of the girls who had flittered through the season with Lloyd fluttered away like a bevy of scattered butterflies to various resorts on the Florida coast. Kitty departed to make her long-talked-of visit to Gay in San Antonio, Katie Mallard went with an invalid aunt to Biloxi, and Lloyd came back to the country. She was almost as much alone as she had been that winter when she had not been allowed to return to Warwick Hall after the Christmas vacation.
True, Allison was at home after her interesting trip abroad, with the MacIntyres, and Lloyd spent many hours at The Beeches. But Raleigh Claiborne's sister from Washington was there on a visit part of the time, and Raleigh himself made several flying trips, and although Allison's engagement made her doubly interesting to the younger girls, it seemed to rise up as a sort of wall between them and their old intimacy. She had so many new interests now that she did not enter quite so heartily into the old ones.