Whereupon Madeline murmured that it was Babbie’s party, not hers, and Babe and Betty declared they would wait until exactly quarter to three and then they were going to see the Mona Lisa.
And at quarter to three they went, Babbie giving a reluctant consent to their making a detour past the other possible rendezvous. But Billy and Mr. Trevelyan were not there, and when Madeline inquired of the very stolid guard he only shrugged his shoulders and said there had been any number of young men passing in since two o’clock. Some had waited, some not.
“Seems to me Mr. Trevelyan isn’t such a good conductor as he has the reputation for being,” said Betty. “Yesterday he didn’t meet his sister, and nearly didn’t find us, and to-day his arrangements haven’t worked out very well.”
“Well, fortunately it doesn’t matter,” said Babbie, sitting down with a rapturous little sigh before the Mona Lisa. “The pictures are here, and after we’ve seen a few we can go and have some of those little boat-shaped strawberry tarts that we saw in the patisserie window. If they’d taken us somewhere to eat we should probably have had to have stupid ices.”
“And the moral, as our friend Mary would say,” laughed Madeline, “is that when you’re hunting alone you can do as you please, which is an advantage that our friend Mary has forever forfeited. Who votes to have the strawberry tarts soon?”
“Maxim for travelers,” said Babe, dejectedly, “‘when you’ve had enough, stop,’ and enough is what you can see in just a little more than half a day.”
So the girls had crossed the Seine on the top of a lumbering tram, and walked from the Luxembourg Gardens, where a concert was going on, to the queer little street where Madeline’s pension was hidden; and they had cooled off, rested, and dressed for dinner before a maid brought Babbie a card—Billy Benson’s.
“Ask him into the garden and say I’ll be there in a moment,” Babbie ordered, and went down after a perfectly needless delay, by way of preliminary discipline, prepared to receive Billy’s excuses coldly and to give him a very unhappy quarter of an hour in return for the annoyance he had caused her earlier in the afternoon.
But Billy made no excuses. Instead he announced blandly, “Well, I’m two hundred dollars poorer than I was last night and a good deal wiser, and I feel like a young idiot; but it certainly makes a good story, if that’s any consolation.”
Babbie stared. “What do you mean? Why aren’t you on your way to your dance?”