"Good morning, Teddy," said Kathleen.
"Oh ... 'morning!" with a marvellous recovery of sang-froid; "how are you? I was looking for my tennis-racket...."
"Rather warm for tennis this morning, isn't it? I thought we might walk over to Hele Bay and bathe there, if you've nothing better to do?"
"Er—I'm afraid I'm engaged," Teddy replied distantly. And, slightly raising his cap to her, strolled from the room.
Kathleen turned to meet the mischievous twinkle in the eye of Teddy's stepfather, leaning against the open garden door. She strove to laugh away her furious discomfiture.
"It looks as though I'd been jilted!"—(Nasty little boy ... to let it happen in front of Napier Kirby!)
"Teddy always does that. Don't let it worry you. I'll walk with you to Hele Bay."
"Thanks!" between the condescension of the man and of the boy there was not much to choose. "Thanks; I'd rather go alone."
Giving Hele a wide berth, she went past the Haunted Farm, through the wood of the picnic, and across a stile into the lush pastured valley beyond. And she thought fiercely and incessantly of Napier Kirby....
Fred Worley, who admired his friend to the verge of boring to extinction anyone who cared to listen on the subject, had supplied her with quite an amount of interesting information. She had learnt that Kirby was born in New Zealand, but that he had at a very early age emigrated to Europe. After a great deal of adventuring, he had finally settled down to make money in the manufacture of a new line of cheap but effective motor-cars: the "Dagmar," of which he had by swift appreciative instinct acquired the patent.