"The pastoral cancelled? Why?" The girl's voice was incredulous. "But I've been to all the trouble of getting a special costume, nearly all the younger people in the house-party have been chosen on purpose."
"Our friend the matinée idol has flown away to pick up a bigger seed elsewhere."
A flush of anger colored Beatrix's face and her eyes glinted. "He said something to me this morning about motion pictures. I thought he was endeavoring to advertise himself. I never dreamed he would have the impertinence to chuck us!"
"Well, his withdrawal simplified things, my dear, as I will tell you later. Come to my room ten minutes before dinner and I will give you the latest family plan. In the meantime, two's company, and I will get a few words with my old friend, the Admiral, who is wandering about like a lost soul." Aunt Honoria nodded and with her shoulders as square as those of a well-drilled man, went gracefully to where the septuagenarian lover was either chewing the cud of bitter reflection or recovering from a long bout of exaggerated and over-emphasized commonplaces.
And then Beatrix turned sharply to Franklin. "Be good enough to tell me what all this means," she said.
Franklin showed his teeth in his peculiar silent laugh. "Why put a pin through Miss Vanderdyke's little surprise?"
Beatrix intended to know. Her curiosity was alight. It was so obvious that she had been under discussion and as the family was to be dragged in, so certain that she was going to be coerced into something totally against her wishes. But she changed her tactics.
"Oh, look," she cried, "isn't that sail perfectly charming against the sky?"
"Corking," said Franklin, not looking at it, but at her. By Jupiter, how lovely, how desirable, but how amazingly perverse she was! A man would have not lived for nothing who could break her and make her, even if she never returned his love.
"It's a good world," she said, with a little sigh, waiting to catch Franklin on the hop. "Sometimes I'm consumed with a longing to be right away in the middle of the sea—to get even with things."