Ethel laughed. “Dr. Eaton says it did,” she said. “He told me particularly to thank you all for bringing me down there. But I think—well, to tell you the truth, I think my mind was already made up, only I didn’t know it. It seems to me now that I might have decided last summer and saved all this—this ridiculous explanation,” ended Ethel, smiling happily at her eager little audience.
Just at that moment a maid appeared with cards for Miss Hale, and “The Merry Hearts” realized suddenly that it was time to go home.
“Remember it’s not regularly announced until to-morrow night,” Ethel warned them, as they went down the steps singing,
“Here’s to our Miss Hale,
May she never, never fail,”
at the top of nine vigorous lungs.
“Well,” said Mary Brooks, when the tribute of song was duly paid, “the moral of that is: appearances are deceitful, particularly when they are meant to be deceitful. Madeline, how in the world did you find out that they’d known each other before?”
“Dr. Eaton said he’d been to a Harding prom., and I rudely asked him with whom,” confessed Madeline.
“And how about you, Betty?”
“Oh, I had more opportunities to notice Ethel than the rest of you,” said Betty, evasively. “I only put little things together and guessed.”
She was not going to give Mary’s faction a chance to crow over her, but having heard Ethel’s story, she was privately of the opinion that the Nassau trip, though not perhaps the match-makers’ devices, had helped Ethel to decide her momentous question. “That’s what was worrying her before vacation,” she reflected, “and it made her queer and changeable on the trip. One minute she thought she was going to be married, and the next she was afraid she wasn’t. But as soon as she got back to her beloved work she found out that she liked him best.”