“Oh, there must be reasons. But——” Joy could not throw off the horror that was settling upon her. “But—where else could she be, and why? She has no other girl friends—oh, Jerry! Why, of course—there’s Félicie Durant!”
“I called her up at noontime,” Jerry droned. “She hadn’t seen her for a week or so.”
The bell rang finally.
“Bet it’s the freshman; freshmen always are early”; from Jerry.
But it was Jim. Just the sight of him made Joy a little more calm. He was the sort of person to whom one turned naturally; he gave out that “quiet strength” which is too often imposed upon to carry the burdens of others. A few swift questions, more or less hysterical answers, and the story was before him. A moment, and Jerry found the generalship taken away from her as Jim gave orders of procedure. He had not completed mapping out their line of action when the freshman arrived, a freshman who looked rather stunned to find instead of the described pair of girls in evening dress, a girl in street clothes, with a man, and one lone girl with pale face, fiery eyes, and bobbed hair, who was wrapped in a velvet cloak from which protruded a peacock fan—a girl who treated him, doggone it! like a regular chauffeur. She might at least have come in front with him and left the two street-clads by themselves; but no, they all sat in back, whispering until he hauled his car into place at the end of a moderately long line in a narrow Boston street. Then, and then only, did the girl with the bobbed hair condescend to speak to him.
“Do you happen to be familiar with Dum-Dum Barnes and Crawf Harris?”
“Not too familiar,” he replied cautiously. “They’re Seniors.” Then, as they made no move to disembark: “Aren’t you coming in?”
“That’s as might be,” drawled that bobbed-haired girl. “You can go in and see if Crawf and Dum-Dum are there. If they are, you can tell ’em to come out here Q. E. D.—if not, come out and tell us Q. E. D. As for Wigs and Davy—if they’ve got there yet, why, you can tell ’em I’m located here.”
He went off, muttering “Gotcha,” more than ever convinced that she thought he was a chauffeur. When he returned five minutes later, the three were in the same rigid expectancy in which he had left them, with that continued stillness which denotes an uninterrupted absence of conversation. The freshman cleared his throat. Decidedly there was something very cagey about this whole affair.
“I—well, I can’t locate Crawf and Dum-Dum,” he said. “They’re Seniors, you know; I don’t know them very well; and everyone’s dancing in the dark in there, so I can’t make out. Wigs and Dave don’t seem to have gotten there yet——”