"Oh, thunder!" protested young Kennilworth. In the hollow of his hand something that once had been the spongy shapeless center of a breakfast roll crushed back into sponge again. But in the instant of its crushing, crude as the modeling was, half jest, half child's play, I sensed the unmistakable parody of a woman's finger-prints bruising into the soft crest of a man's shoulder. Even in the absurdity of its substance the sincerity of the thing was appalling. Catching my eye alone, young Kennilworth gave an amused but distinctly worldly-wise little laugh.
"Women do care so much, don't they?" he shrugged.
A trifling commotion in the front hall stayed the retort on my lips.
The commotion was Ann Woltor. Coated and hatted and already half-gloved she loomed blackly from the shadows, trying very hard to attract my attention.
In my twinge of anxiety about the May Girl I had quite forgotten Ann Woltor. And in the somewhat heated discussion of Allan John's responsibilities and irresponsibilities, the May Girl also, it would seem, had passed entirely from my mind.
"I'm very sorry," explained Ann Woltor, "but with this unfortunate accident to my tooth I shall have to hurry, of course, right back to town." Even if you had never heard Ann Woltor speak you could have presaged perfectly from her face just what her voice would be like, gravely contralto, curiously sonorous, absolutely without either accent or emphasis, yet carrying in some strange, inex-plainable way a rather goose-fleshy sense of stubbornness and finality. "One can't exactly in a Christian land," droned Ann Woltor, "go round looking like the sole survivor of a massacre."
Across the somewhat sapient mutual consciousness that ever since we had first laid eyes on each other five months ago— and goodness knows how long before that—she had been going round perfectly serenely 'looking like the sole survivor of a massacre,' Ann Woltor and I stared just a bit deeply into each other's eyes. The expression in Ann's eyes was an expression of peculiar poignancy.
"No, of course not!" I conceded with some abruptness. "But surely if you can find the right dentist and he's clever at all, you ought to be able to get back here on the six-thirty train to-night!"
"The six-thirty train? Perhaps," murmured Ann Woltor. Once again her eyes hung upon mine. And I knew and Ann Woltor knew and Ann Woltor knew that I knew,—that she hadn't the slightest intention in the world of returning to us on any train whatsoever. But for some reason known only to herself and perhaps one other, was only too glad to escape from our party—anatomically impossible as that escape sounds—through the loop-hole of a broken tooth. Already both black gloves were fastened, and her black traveling-bag swayed lightly in one slim, determinate hand. "Your maid has ordered the station bus for me," she confided; "and tells me that by changing cars at the Junction and again at Lees—Truly I'm sorry to make any trouble," she interrupted herself. "If there had been any possible way of just slipping out without anybody noticing——!"
"Without anybody noticing?" I cried. "Why, Ann, you dear silly!"