CHAPTER X.
The Reliable Man.
Next day, Freda was agreeably surprised to be called on the telephone, about ten in the morning.
“Are you going to church?” asked Mauney.
“No, are you?” she asked.
“I’m too fed up, Freda, to bother. It’s going to be a warm day and I think we ought to get out in the country, up the river some place. I’ve got a lot to talk about.”
They motored to Shadow Bay, a dozen miles west of Lockwood, and had dinner together at the Chalet, a summer place, which, owing to the auspicious weather, was still open.
“I’m beginning to understand Lockwood better,” Mauney said, as they sat on a shaded cliff after dinner. “I don’t remember ever having put in a more disagreeable week in my life.”
“What’s wrong?” she enquired, with no suggestion in her voice that her own past week had been the most unpleasant she could recall.
“Just everything,” he said. “I’m foolish to mind it at all. But the staff of the collegiate are the hardest people to get acquainted with. They’re all capable, unusually so, but terribly stand-offish.”
“That, my dear boy, is the key-note of Lockwood,” she interrupted. “They’ve just naturally acquired that manner.”