“How lovely!” murmured Constance, burying her face in the big blue bouquet. “And a note hidden in them! What fun! Just like a story.”
The note was from Timmy Wentworth. “Your sister is busy all this morning. She says you are to take breakfast at nine at Cuyler’s with the Misses Dutton. They will call for you. At ten won’t you meet me at the boat-house for our paddle? It will give me such pleasure. Timmy Wentworth.”
Constance dressed with eager haste. The Duttons were in their liveliest mood. Cuyler’s waffles fairly melted in your mouth. And at ten she was going canoeing with Timmy Wentworth!
The Duttons escorted her as far as the top of Observatory Hill, and having pointed out the boat-house, departed unceremoniously for a ten o’clock quiz. Constance consulted a tiny mirror that hung from her silver chain, smoothed her hair, straightened her coat collar, and walked leisurely down, through the campus gardens and past the famous frog pond, to Paradise. At the top of the boat-house stairs she paused and looked to see if Timmy was waiting. It was too dark inside the boat-house to see any one, but on the railing perched a tall, merry-faced girl in a blue and white jumper, who waved friendly greetings. She must have been one of the crowd at the station, Constance reflected, and she waved back cordially as she hurried down the stairs.
A TALL, MERRY-FACED GIRL
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” The tall girl’s firm hand-shake made Constance wince. “And the woods are full of flowers. Fluffy and I were out before breakfast getting a boatful for the Belden House senior tea. We stole out a bunch for you. Shall we be off?”
“Ye-es,” stammered Constance. “That is, I was expecting——”
“How stupid!” broke in the tall girl eagerly. “I forgot to say that I’m Felicia Wentworth, commonly known as Timmy for no reason under the sun. Now shall we be off?”
“Oh, yes,” said Constance hastily, too proud to show either astonishment or disappointment. It was an entertaining trip, too, in spite of everything. Timmy was not at all Constance’s idea of a college grind. She had just come back from a Dartmouth prom. She was going home next Saturday to see about her junior usher dress, and incidentally to star in an amateur vaudeville performance at the Country Club her family belonged to. It appeared that amateur vaudeville shows, tennis, canoeing, and going to “stunty” house-parties—she was going to “a duck of a one” in June—were Timmy’s chief diversions. Yet she confided to Constance that she was hoping hard to make the Phi Kappa honor list next year, and that she had spent the previous afternoon in “digging fiercely” on a philosophy paper, because “if you had a good head for books what was the use of muddling along?”