"Bully for Isabel!" Corrie approved, pensiveness cast aside. "Come up to them, Gerard. I hear her tooting for us with the horn."
From the little scarlet runabout—the largest motor vehicle Mr. Rose would allow his vigorous niece—Isabel and Flavia had descended.
"We came to see what you were doing," Isabel welcomed the group who issued from the club-house. "I don't suppose Flavia would have come if she hadn't been wondering whether Corrie was drowning himself. Go ahead and start; don't wait on our account. But you had better eat your lunch first, if you haven't already, for you will have no time to eat in the boat on that sea."
"We haven't any lunch," Corrie cheerfully declared. "I gave it to a tramp after I threw him overboard. You're just in time to take us home for luncheon and save our lives."
"You look as if you had been fighting," Isabel criticized, with a scornful survey of his attire. "You are all splashed with dirty water, your cravat is pulled crooked and your coat is torn. We saw your tramp; he passed us a few moments ago and we recognized your blue flannel suit with the Dear Me's insignia on the lapel. Mr. Rupert guessed what you had been doing, when he saw the boat all in disorder and the pier all wet. The man's hairy, dirty face looked horrid above your clothes."
"A contrast to my beauty, not so? Fix my cravat, please, ma'am; I can't see the thing. But his face wasn't dirty, for I washed it."
"Why should I fix your wet cravat? Hold my gloves, then. Where is your scarf-pin? Stolen by your tramp, I suppose."
Gerard had joined Flavia, but neither yet had spoken, watching the cousins. They had not the fluent familiarity of intercourse possessed by the two who looked and acted very like a pair of handsome boys. Moreover, Gerard distrusted himself, fearing to say too much, too soon. He was approaching Flavia carefully and delicately as a man striving to close his hand on some frail, elusive creature whose capture he scarcely dares hope possible. And she gave him no help. Her frank gentleness and impersonal cordiality gave neither encouragement nor discouragement, no foothold smooth or rough.
The actual position he had never even conceived; the fact that she was completely unconscious of his desire to woo her. He had no way of knowing that it was his attitude toward Isabel she considered in all his words and acts, remembering her cousin's confident appropriation of the guest. It was of Isabel that she spoke now, while Gerard hesitated for the right word to offer the girl beside him.
"The roads were very wet and slippery," she remarked. "If Isabel were not a good driver, I think we would have found ourselves in a ditch. Indeed," her soft mouth dimpled into a smile, "once I thought we were in one. One wheel was. But we wiggled out again. Mr. Rupert wanted to put the chains on the wheels, but she said we did not need them."