But Jack’s expression had changed queerly. He grew slightly red and avoided looking directly at Kate. “No need to get any one yet,” he objected. “Heaven knows when Rose will be out. She’s awfully pokey—slow. Let us begin just by ourselves till she does appear, anyway. Can you jump? Here’s a hand.”
But Kate shook her head. “No, thanks. I don’t think I’ll play, after all. I may be called any minute to help Aunt Katherine, and besides—besides, it’s very warm, isn’t it?”
Kate was looking at the pad in her hand, about to turn away.
But Jack kept her a minute. “Oh, I say! You aren’t offended, are you? I wouldn’t do that for anything.”
“No, of course not.” But Kate’s negation was made only out of a spirit of reserve and also embarrassment. “No.”
“But you are, and I don’t wonder. Of course you’d be on your cousin’s side. And listen. We are, too. Rose and I and all of us are, always have been. We never could see any sense in all the hubbub. It’s just been Grandmother and Grandmother’s friends. We all thought Elsie was great stuff when she visited Miss Frazier before—— And we’re coming to the party to-night, you bet. Only—at this minute Grandmother is sitting right up there in a window where she can see the court, and it might change her, decide her for some reason not to go to-night. She feels that her going formally and giving in, as it were, publicly, is the thing that’s going to turn the trick. It’s her show, sort of. If we did it first, now, she might be just as bad as ever again, begin all over again. Do you see?”
“No, I don’t see,” Kate said in all truth. Jack’s explanations shed no light whatsoever. His face had grown steadily redder as he realized that he had simply made a mess of it. “I don’t see.”
But even as she stood looking at Jack Denton she was smiling at herself mentally, to hear how her voice had taken on the very timbre of Elsie’s when she was being her most unpleasantly polite. What a copy cat she was. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in finding herself so successful in a self-made rôle. “All you say is just Greek to me. And I ought to be writing my letter. Good morning.”
She turned deliberately and sauntered back to her place in the shade of the orchard. But Jack did not leave the wall. He stayed there watching her, a frown gathering on his brow. When she was seated, with her back against an apple tree trunk and her pad ready on her knee, he called again.
“Oh, I say,” he called. “I thought you knew everything about it all, of course. If you don’t, it’s a shame. I just can’t be apologetic enough.”