And Leslie heroically refrained from suggesting that even visitors might be warded off if one didn't forget the dash of cold water. However, he did remind her that there needed no signs to tell her there was a visitor on the way. And he added, with rather juvenile petulance: "I guess he'd come if there weren't any grounds in the pot!"
But this riled her. "I don't mean to sit here and listen to you speaking disrespectfully of Mr. Barry! He's much older, and you can't treat him as you would one of the boys."
"I don't want to," her friend returned, vaguely, yet still somehow pointedly.
She smiled, erasing the friction from their talk. "In the case of the coffee grounds, as I understand it, if it seems soft it's a lady, and if it's hard it's a man. Am I all wrong? Is it tea leaves I'm thinking of? At any rate, we'll experiment!" She eyed her companion with coy and almost vicious pleasure. "Perhaps this one's only Aunt Marjie, who's already here."
She carried the problematical atom to her teeth. The test, which she strove to make momentous, was one to which Leslie brought only a melancholy interest. She set her teeth firmly together. There was a little brittle crack. The indisputable fact that it was Lynndal Barry thrust between them a short silence.
3
It was a subject to which they had come round, almost automatically, at intervals, ever since the letter arrived.
Ah, the letter, the fateful letter! The letter advising her that the man to whom she was virtually engaged would put in an appearance on such and such a day!