"He said you weren't a ladies' man."
"Oh!" said Howard Locke with a grin. "So he's been talking behind my back, has he?"
"I'm afraid so," she admitted.
"And may I ask why you agree with him—why I am condemned?"
"Because," said Polly Wickes, "it would have been ever so much nicer, instead of saying what you did, to have expressed delight that the tour of inspection wasn't over—something about charming company, you know, even if everything you saw bored you to death."
"Unfair!" Locke frowned with mock severity. "Most unfair! I was going to say something like that, and now I can't because you'll swear you put the words into my mouth and I simply parroted them."
"Sir," she said airily, "will you see the bungalows and the pickaninnies next, or the boathouse?"
"I am contrite and humble," he said meekly.
Polly Wickes' laughter rippled out on the air.
"Come on, then!" she cried, and, turning, began to run along the path through the grove of trees where they had been walking.