I’m glad you told me it didn’t really mean anything serious to you—I was sure it wouldn’t. I hope you won’t feel I ought to have given you my confidence, and I would have given it if it hadn’t been such a serious matter. Besides, the real truth is, Lily, our whole friendship seemed to be centred on your affairs and you, never on me or mine. You were so interested in the confidences you made to me, you never even seemed to think I had any to make of my own and you never invited any. Please don’t take this for criticism—and please wish me happiness!
Lily dressed hurriedly; Ada had indeed mystified and disturbed her now; and she was eager to get to the telephone downstairs and find out what in the world this strange communication portended. But as she passed the dining-room door on her way to the little telephone table in the hall, her mother called to her. Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were at breakfast.
“Not now, Mamma. I’ll come in a moment. I want to telephone to Ada first.”
“Lily,” her father said, urgently, “I wouldn’t.”
His tone arrested her, and she paused near the doorway.
“You wouldn’t telephone to Ada?” she asked, nervously. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“Ada’s not there,” he said, gravely. “Come here, Lily.”
She came in slowly, looking at him with an appealing apprehension; and his own look, in return, was compassionate. He held a morning paper in his hand, and moved as if to offer it to her, then withheld it. “Wait,” he said. “Your mother and I both think her family have behaved foolishly. If they’d shown a little more discretion—but she’s the sort of girl nobody’d have dreamed would be up to this sort of thing, and I suppose they must have been terribly upset. Of course, they might have known the papers would get it, though, when they began calling up the police to look for her and stop the——”
“Police!” Lily gasped. “Papa! What are you talking about?”
“Ada Corey,” he said. “She never came home from the dance last night. She’s run away with that crazy young Price Gleason. They eloped from the Country Club, and the paper says they were married at a village squire’s office about an hour afterward.”