The boy flushed painfully. Keith did not like girls—that is, he SAID he did not like them. They made him conscious of his hands and feet, and stiffened his tongue so that it would not obey his will. The prettier the girls were, the more acute was his discomfiture. Particularly, therefore, did he dislike these two girls—they were the prettiest of the lot. They were Mazie Sanborn and her friend Dorothy Parkman.
Mazie was the daughter of the town's richest manufacturer, and Dorothy was her cousin from Chicago, who made such long visits to her Eastern relatives that it seemed sometimes almost as if she were as much of a Hinsdale girl as was Mazie herself.
To-day Mazie's blue eyes and Dorothy's brown ones were full of mischief.
"Well, why don't you say something? Why don't you apologize?" demanded
Mazie.
'"Pol—pologize? What for?" In his embarrassed misery Keith resorted to bravado in voice and manner.
"Why, for passing us by in that impertinent fashion," returned Mazie loftily. "Do you think that is the way ladies should be treated?" (Mazie was thirteen and Dorothy fourteen.) "The idea!"
For a minute Keith stared helplessly, shifting from one foot to the other. Then, with an inarticulate grunt, he turned away.
But Mazie was not to be so easily thwarted. With a mere flit of her hand she tossed aside a score of years, and became instantly nothing more than a wheedling little girl coaxing a playmate.
"Aw, Keithie, don't get mad! I was only fooling. Say, tell me, HAVE you been up to Uncle Joe Harrington's?"
Because Mazie had caught his arm and now held it tightly, the boy perforce came to a stop.