“Oh, but I know how,” said Betty. “Aunt Lydia showed me how to do it gracefully. You give a little kick—ever so little and nobody sees it—and then you just sink into your seat. I can do it well.”
“You were always clever,” exclaimed Virginia, as sweetly as before. She was parting her satiny hair over her forehead, and the glass gave back a youthful likeness of Mrs. Ambler. She was the beauty of the family, and she knew it, which made her all the lovelier to Betty.
“I declare, your freckles are all gone,” she said, as her sister's head looked over her shoulder. “I wonder if it is the buttermilk that has made you so white?”
“It must be that,” admitted Betty, who had used it faithfully for the sixty nights. “Aunt Lydia says it works wonders.” Then, as she looked at herself, her eyes narrowed and she laughed aloud. “Why, Dan won't know me,” she cried merrily.
But whatever hopes she had of Dan withered in the summer. When he came home for the holidays, he brought with him an unmistakable swagger and a supply of coloured neckerchiefs. On his first visit to Uplands he called Virginia “my pretty child,” and said “Good day, little lady,” to Betty. He carried himself like an Indian, as the Governor put it, and he was very lithe and muscular, though he did not measure up to Champe by half a head. It was the Montjoy blood in him, people thought, for the Lightfoots were all of great height, and he had, too, a shock of his father's coarse black hair, which flared stiffly above the brilliant Lightfoot eyes. As he galloped along the turnpike on Prince Rupert, the travelling countrymen turned to look after him, and muttered that “dare-devil Jack Montjoy had risen from his grave—if he had a grave.”
Once he met Betty at the gate, and catching her up before him, dashed with her as far as Aunt Ailsey's cabin and back again. “You are as light as a fly,” he said with a laugh, “and not much bigger. There, take your hair out of my eyes, or I'll ride amuck.”
Betty caught her hair in one hand and drew it across her breast. “This is like—” she began gayly, and checked herself. She was thinking of “that devil Jack Montjoy and Jane Lightfoot.”
“I must take my chance now,” said Dan, in his easy, masterful way. “You will be too old for this by next year. Why, you will be in long dresses then, and Virginia—have you noticed, by the way, what a beauty Virginia is going to be?”
“She is just lovely,” heartily agreed Betty. “She's prettier than your Great-aunt Emmeline, isn't she?”
“By George, she is. And I've been in love with Great-aunt Emmeline for ten years because I couldn't find her match. I say, don't let anybody go off with Virginia while I'm at college, will you?”