“Perhaps the men here are too appreciative of trifles,” she remarked stiffly. “It may be different in the country.”
Billy took her back silently. Things were very different in the country; if she only knew how different, he surmised, she would despise him even more. Turning dazedly to go off the ice he ran right into the committee girl.
It was fortunate that the speed of his arms measured up pretty well with the force of his body, otherwise the girl might have had a bad fall. As it was, there was a blue mark on her shoulder that she kept hidden for some days. The fear that it might be there troubled Billy not a little. He dropped his hand and stood there terrified.
“Thank you,” she said, “I was just about gone,” and then she laughed, just naturally laughed at his confusion, laughed with a frank, reassuring kindness in her friendly eyes, and just as unconcernedly as he had met her the night before, Billy found himself skating down the ice with her. He found himself talking to her without restraint and quite on a level. Then she introduced him to a crowd of the finest girls he had ever known. Altogether, he was having a very good time. He had almost forgotten the agony it gave him to see Miss Evison sweep past, listening
with rapt attention, evidently, to the social oratory of the “interesting” man, when a thin little voice beside him almost whispered—
“Was I terribly horrid?”
If she had been alluring before in her many variable little moods, she was irresistible when she put all that childish appeal to be forgiven into her misty eyes and pouting mouth. Billy looked and wondered. He couldn’t see that she had done much to require forgiveness, but it made him very happy to have her come back; so he laughed into her troubled eyes as one does to a penitent child, and answered:—
“I think you were. How far will you come now to make up for it?” Considering his inexperience, he was playing up to her lead very well.
She would go any distance. She would even skate with him a little while after the others had all gone—if he had time before his train left. She told him in broken, embarrassed little phrases, that she was impulsive, that she guessed she was spoiled, but she was always sorry after she had been rude; she would do anything to make up, she wanted always to be kind, because she just couldn’t stand it not to have people love her.
And Billy replied gallantly that he didn’t see how anyone could help it.