“Couldn’t you take me?” asked Connie eagerly.
Betty considered. “Why—yes—yes, that might be quite as well. Then you go and get ready, while I do the telephoning.”
Twenty minutes later Connie and Betty were flying along the road to Gay’s Mills. It was a slender chance, but in the absence of other clues it must serve. Connie confided to Betty that she had never been in an automobile before.
“It doesn’t matter,” Betty told her absently. “Oh, I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I quite understood what you said.”
Connie lapsed into rather frightened silence, and Betty was left free to consider the situation. “Undertaking” Montana Marie O’Toole looked, this morning, like a pretty serious business. If she really had eloped, what would Mrs. O’Toole say? And what would President Wallace think? Not much use getting her through mid-years for an ending like this. But somehow Betty couldn’t believe that her freshman would be so foolish. She almost ordered the chauffeur to drive back to the campus; she was sure they would find that Georgia was missing too, and the other riding people. Then suddenly she remembered the maid and the groom, as she had thought them, talking by the Morton House door, and Montana Marie’s belated arrival at Mrs. Post’s treat. Was an elopement perhaps the kind of thing that you didn’t rehearse? Betty’s heart sank. Perhaps she ought to have called Mrs. Post and divided responsibilities. Perhaps she ought even to have aroused Prexy. Certainly she ought to have had a better reason than Connie’s vague surmises for choosing the Gay’s Mills road. The Gay’s Mills road turned sharply just then, and Betty saw two horseback riders trotting decorously to meet her—Montana Marie in her Western riding things, including the forbidden magenta handkerchief, and a man whom Connie identified briefly with an excited ungrammatical little squeak.
“It’s him!”
CHAPTER XIX
LIVING UP TO HARDING
“Sh!” Betty warned her hastily, because of the chauffeur, and leaning forward she ordered him to stop. “I want to speak to those people,” she explained briefly.
Just then Montana Marie, who had the sun in her eyes, recognized Betty, and triumphantly announced the discovery to her companion in her shrillest tones. “It’s Miss Wales come after us. What did I tell you?”
Then she slipped off her horse, and with the reins thrown over her arm came to meet Betty, while the man from Montana, looking very glum and very foolish, prepared to stay where he was.