“How are your eyes feeling, Ruth?” questioned Jack anxiously, as he walked side by side with the girl on the way to the moving picture theater. As my old readers know, Ruth had once suffered dreadfully through getting some pepper into her eyes, and it had been feared that she might go blind.
“Oh, my eyes are quite all right again, Jack,” answered the girl. “Sometimes they feel the least bit scratchy. But I bathe them with a solution the doctor gave me and then they feel quite natural.”
“I’m mighty glad to hear that,” Jack returned warmly. For of all the girls who were friends of his sister he liked Ruth the best.
As luck would have it, there was a very good show on that afternoon, and as a consequence a crowd had assembled to obtain tickets of admission. Randy went ahead to get all the tickets needed, and while he did this Martha plucked her brother by the coat sleeve and drew him a little to one side.
“What’s this you’ve got to tell me, Martha?” questioned the young captain in a whisper.
“It’s about a fellow at your school—a chap named Lester Bangs,” replied the girl.
“Oh, you mean the fellow we call Brassy Bangs! What about him?”
“He and one or two of his particular chums have been up to Clearwater Hall three times. They took some of the girls out in a sleigh they hired, and that Bangs did his level best to get Ruth to go along. And now he has invited her to attend some kind of a party next week,” was Martha’s reply, words which for some reason he could not explain even to himself cut Jack to the heart.