“Oh, she’s not here,” explained Betty again. “She’s seasick,—or at least she’s expecting to be.”
“Not Miss Ethel Hale?” asked Dr. Eaton, in a tone that was unmistakably eager. Betty nodded.
“How—how—very pleasant,” stammered Dr. Eaton. “I—I do know her, but I didn’t know she was going to take this trip. May I ask, Miss Wales, if she knows that I am on board?”
“No,” answered Betty hastily, wondering why he should be so dreadfully embarrassed, and hoping that she was not nipping Mary’s romance in the bud. “Or at least I don’t think that she does.”
“Thank you,” said Dr. Eaton soberly.
The next minute he had stepped ahead of Mary and was asking the steward for places for a party of eleven.
“You see,” he said, when they were all seated, “I insist upon being counted in with the rest of the club, even if I did get here by accident.”
Perhaps it was because Dr. Eaton talked so entertainingly all through the meal, or perhaps the big bunch of roses that Eleanor had put in the middle of the table had something to do with it. At any rate “The Merry Hearts” forgot their fear of seasickness, and ate a good dinner; and no one but Roberta was ill for a minute of the trip. Mary insisted that even Roberta was not really seasick—that she was just shamming, so that she could lie in bed all day, and be waited on, and have Dr. Eaton and Miss Hale send her sympathetic messages.
Dr. Eaton did not send any sympathetic messages to Miss Hale. He did not even inquire for her, but when on the second afternoon, she surprised the girls by coming up on deck, he was the first one to see her and to spring to take her rug and her book, and put her steamer chair in a sheltered corner, out of the way of the saucy little breeze that was blowing the blue sea into the tiniest of ripples.