“Next time,” advised Rachel laughingly, “you’d better take us into your confidence. You’ve given yourself a lot of unnecessary bother, and us quite a little worry, though we don’t mind that now.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that he spent the summer at the same place that you did?” asked little Helen Adams.
Mary started. “Who told you that?” she demanded anxiously.
“Nobody but Lucile,” explained Betty in soothing tones. “She visited there for a week, and this afternoon just by chance she happened to speak of seeing him. It fitted in beautifully, you see. She doesn’t know you were there too, so it’s all right.”
Mary gave a relieved little sigh, and then, turning suddenly, fell upon the row of pitiless inquisitors, embracing as many as possible and smiling benignly at the rest. “Oh, girls, he’s a dear,” she said. “He’s worth twenty of the gilded youths you meet out in society.” She drew back hastily. “But we’re only good friends,” she declared. “He’s been down a few times to spend Sunday—that was how I heard about the lecture—but he comes to see father as much as to see me—and—and you mustn’t gossip.”
“We won’t,” Katherine promised for them all. “You can trust us. We always seem to have a faculty romance or two on our hands. We’re getting used to it.”
“But it’s not a romance,” wailed Mary. “He took me walking and driving because mother asks him to dinner. We’re nothing but jolly good friends.”
“Nothing but jolly good friends—”
That was the last thing Mary said when, late the next afternoon, her “little friends” waved her off for home.
“Isn’t she just about the last person you’d select for a professor’s wife?” said Helen, as Mary’s stylish little figure, poised on the rear platform of the train, swung out of sight around a curve.