Ethel looked round the circle of eager faces. “Then you must promise not to talk about it,” she said.
“Of course,” they chorused.
“We haven’t said a word so far,” declared Bob proudly.
“I know you haven’t, and that’s why I decided to tell you first of all, but——” Ethel hesitated again. “It’s so absurd. But of course you want to know. Why, last fall when Mr. Eaton told me he was coming here to teach, I—you can imagine how I felt—when he’d given me a year to think it over in—to decide between my work and marrying him——”
“And then he came to watch you think?” suggested Helen Adams quaintly.
“Exactly,” laughed Ethel. “That was just it, and while he watched me, every one else would be watching both of us. I told him it was an impossible arrangement, but it seemed impossible for him to withdraw then, so I made him promise to leave me entirely alone and not to let any one guess that we had known each other before.”
“Oh, I see,” cried Mary Brooks delightedly. “What a funny idea! And after the Nassau trip you went back to it again?”
Ethel’s dimples came into sudden play. “Yes,” she said, “that was the agreement. When I found that instead of running away from Mr. Eaton I had taken passage on the same boat with him, we decided that the only thing to do was to seem reasonably friendly, or else you girls would wonder what the matter was, and then”—Ethel blushed hotly—“it was dreadfully awkward. We were always being either too distant or too friendly, but I couldn’t explain, so I had to trust you girls not to gossip. I knew I could. And—and that’s every bit there is to tell, little sister.”
“Then Nassau did help you to make up your mind?” asked Mary, anxiously.