“Dick Blake,” she began, bringing the smiling Frenchman over to the other group, “do you mean to tell me that you’ve forgotten my cousin Edmond, after all the fun we had together in Paris? That’s as bad as Edmond’s having forgotten his English, so that he couldn’t tell Betty in plain terms that she was a thief.”
“Ah, Madeline!” He turned to Betty, eager to deny such an intention, but his face fell and he made a comical gesture of inadequacy. “It ez so far away! I cannot say my meaning.”
“So long ago, you mean, don’t you, young man?” asked Mr. Morton, eyeing him as if he were some sort of strange animal. “See here, these reunions are all very interesting, but I’m getting hungry. Now, why can’t you all have dinner with me at that hotel over there? Baedeker says it’s the best in the place. A sort of peace festival, you know. Miss B. A., suppose you take me in and present me to Mrs. Hildreth and see what she says about it.”
Babe had hurried in ahead of them with the news of Betty’s safe return, without waiting to have any conversation with Mr. Morton. But when the dinner project was approved by Mrs. Hildreth and Mr. Morton insisted that “the little tomboy” must sit on his left, Babe made no objection, and she had spirited repartees ready for all Mr. Morton’s sallies. She even went so far as to tell him about the Harvard-Cambridge race and ask him, as she had promised John she would, to take her to see it.
“Sure you won’t throw me over for a younger beau?” he asked her. “He’s likely to be in London then if I am, you know.”
But Babe only laughed unconcernedly, and assured him that she never, never broke engagements.
The party separated early because, as Mr. Morton explained jovially, he and Mr. Blake had urgent business in Dol. Mr. Blake had managed to sit beside Madeline at dinner, and had told her all about his success with Mr. Morton, and what he hoped might come of it.
“I just must tell some one or I’ll burst,” Blake confided. “Mr. Morton has been asking me about the magazine. ‘If you had a hundred thousand or so and a free hand, could you win out with it?’ he asked me. So who knows, Madeline—my chance may have come at last!”
“Oh, Dick,” Madeline began, breathlessly, “wouldn’t that be—— I’m going to touch wood right away,” she added, suiting the action to the word. Dick laughed, but his eyes were shining with a new hope and purpose.
“He never mentioned Eleanor, of course,” Madeline told the others, as they brushed their hair in Babe’s room and discussed the events of the most exciting day of the summer. “But that’s why he cares so much. He used to be the most indifferent, blasé person you ever saw.”