“Not a particle!” echoed Nan.
“Oh, that little cousin of ours?” said Jeff, pausing in his game.
“Jeff, how can you?” cried Mildred. “She’s a very common person who happens to be named Buck and now they are trumping up some foolish old tale that they were Bucknors ’way back yonder in the middle ages and that they are related to us. It is too ridiculous for words.”
“Our kin all the same,” teased Jeff, going on with his game.
“Right fetching skirt!” said Tom. “She was flirting with some men on the hotel porch when we drove by this morning. I reckon they were all cousins, too.”
Jeff looked up from his game with a gleam of anger in his eye. He lost track of the cards, got confused, played from the wrong hand, 114 blocked himself from a re-entry and promptly got set. All because Tom Harbison intimated that Judith Buck was not conducting herself with propriety.
“Here comes somebody! I saw a car turn in from the pike,” announced Nan. “I hope it isn’t any more company.”
The attention of everyone was focused on the approaching vehicle. It was Judith’s little blue car, skimming down the avenue with the usual speed exacted of it by its stern young mistress, who seemed bent on getting at least thirty-six hours out of the twenty-four. No one could have said she did not have style in her manner of turning a curve and neatly landing at the yard gate.
“Speak of the devil,” muttered Mildred, “if it isn’t that Judith Buck. What on earth can she want?”
Judith, with her usual expedition, was out of the car and with sample case in hand was through the gate and half way up the walk before any one attempted to answer Mildred’s query.