All my blood raced up to my head, as if I were going to have a sunstroke.
"No wonder I had a presentiment," I groaned, forgetting my fright about the horse, for a moment. "Do stand by me."
"I will," said Sally.
Mrs. Trowbridge and the girls were busy in the kitchen, making peach jam; so when the wretched old chaise drew up close to the verandah, Sally and I were alone to receive it.
If my sense of humour hadn't been trampled upon by various emotions which were all jumping about at the same time, I should have had hard work not to laugh when Stan and Mrs. Ess Kay scrambled out from under the lumbering old hood, which was like a great coal scuttle turned over their heads. Their hair was grey with dust, their faces purple with heat, and evidently they were both in towering tempers.
Stan looked at me the way he did once when I was small and spoiled his favourite cricket bat by digging up worms with it;--as if he could have shaken me well and boxed my ears, and would if I weren't a girl. As for Mrs. Ess Kay, she smiled; but her smile meant worse things than Stan's frown.
"Hullo, dear boy," I chirped, nervously. "How do you do, Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox?"
Sally murmured something, too, and Stan had the grace to claw off his hat, showing how damp his poor hair was on his crimson forehead, but he didn't even pretend to smile.
"A nice dance you've led us," said he. "By Jove, I wouldn't have thought it of you, Betty."
"Maybe you don't understand yet," said I. "Wait till I've explained, and I'm sure you won't be cross, because you always were a dear."