Blue Bonnet was half-way upstairs in a moment. She came down to supper, with some of the blue bonnets at the throat of her white wool blouse, and they were not bluer than the shining eyes above them.
The club received Mr. Ashe enthusiastically, though at heart a little anxiously. Kitty had promptly voiced this anxiety in the first moment of meeting him, the day after his arrival. “Have you come to take Blue Bonnet back?” she demanded.
Mr. Ashe’s only answer was a little laugh that might have meant yes, or no.
Kitty was not the only one to ask the question, though perhaps the only one to put it so bluntly. Grandmother asked it with her eyes a good many times during the days that followed.
“But he couldn’t take her back,” Ruth said, one afternoon; “she came to go to school.”
“He’s her guardian—she has to do whatever he says,” Debby added.
Kitty shook her red head wisely. “You mean, he has to do whatever she says, and if she wants to go—I tell you one thing, we’ll mob him if he tries it.”
Mr. Ashe was to be the guest of honor at the club’s ride that day; following the ride, the club were to be his guests at a dinner at the hotel. A dinner at which the souvenirs were gold stick-pins in the form of miniature riding whips—and which were adopted as the club emblem then and there. Altogether, a delightful affair, with menu cards and table decorations bearing witness to the fact that it was a dinner given to a riding club.
“All the same,” Kitty faced Mr. Ashe squarely across the low horseshoe mound of flowers, “you can’t have Blue Bonnet!”
“Why not?” he asked.