"Yes,—exactly," mused the May Girl.
With a heart and an apprehension just about as gray and as heavy as lead I rose and started for the door.
"But, May Girl?" I besought her in a single almost hysterical desire to rouse her from her innocence and her ignorance. "Among all this great array of men and boys that you know— the uncle—yes, even the hired men," I laughed, "and all those blue-smocked boys at the Art School—whom do you really like the best?"
So far her eyes journeyed off into the distance and back again I thought that she had not heard me. Then quite abruptly she answered me. And her voice was all boy-chorister again.
"The best?—why, Allan John!" she said.
Taken all in all there were several things said and done that evening that would have kept any normal hostess awake, I think.
The third morning dawned even rainier than the second! Infinitely rainier than the first! It gave everybody's coming-down-stairs expression a curiously comical twist as though Dame Nature herself had been caught off-guard somehow in a moment of dishabille that though inexpressibly funny, couldn't exactly be referred to—not among mere casual acquaintances—not so early in the morning, anyway!
Yet even though everybody rushed at once to the fireplace instead of to the breakfast-table nobody held us responsible for the weather. Everyone in fact seemed to make rather an extra effort to assure us that he or she—as the case might be, most distinctly did not hold us responsible.
Paul Brenswick indeed grew almost eloquent telling us about an accident to the weather which he himself had witnessed in a climate as supposedly well-regulated as the climate of South Eastern Somewhere was supposed to be! Ann Woltor raked her cheerier memories for the story of a four days' rain- storm which she had experienced once in a very trying visit to her great aunt somebody-or-other on some peculiarly stormbound section of the Welsh coast. George Keet's chivalrous anxiety to set us at our ease was truly heroic. He even improvised a parody about it: "Rain," observed George Keets, "makes strange umbrella-mates!" A leak had developed during the night it seemed in the ceiling directly over his bed—and George, the finicky, the fastidious, the silk- pajamered—had been obliged to crawl out and seek shelter with Rollins and his flannel night-cap in the next room. And Rollins, it appeared, had not proved a particularly genial host.
"By the way, where is Mr. Rollins this morning?" questioned the Bride from her frowning survey of the storm-swept beach.