Shifting the Responsibility
On her pillow that night before dropping to almost instantaneous sleep Linda reflected that if you could not ride the King’s Highway, racing the sands of Santa Monica was a very excellent substitute. It had been a wonderful day after all. When she had left Donald at the Lilac-Valley end of the car line he had held her hand tight an instant and looked into her face with the most engaging of clear, boyish smiles.
“Linda, isn’t our friendship the nicest thing that ever happened to us?” he demanded.
“Yes,” answered Linda promptly, “quite the nicest. Make your plans for all day long next Saturday.”
“I’ll be here before the birds are awake,” promised Donald.
At the close of Monday’s sessions, going down the broad walk from the High School, Donald overtook Linda and in a breathless whisper he said: “What do you think? I came near Oka Sayye again this morning in trig, and his hair was as black as jet, dyed to a midnight, charcoal finish, and I am not right sure that he had not borrowed some girl’s lipstick and rouge pot for the benefit of his lips and cheeks. Positively he’s hectically youthful to-day. What do you know about that?”
Then he hurried on to overtake the crowd of boys he had left. Linda’s heart was racing in her breast.
Turning, she re-entered the school building, and taking a telephone directory she hunted an address, and then, instead of going to the car line that took her to Lilac Valley she went to the address she had looked up. With a pencil she wrote a few lines on a bit of scratch paper in one of her books. That note opened a door and admitted her to the presence of a tall, lean, gray-haired man with quick, blue-gray eyes and lips that seemed capable of being either grave or gay on short notice. With that perfect ease which Linda had acquired through the young days of her life in meeting friends of her father, she went to the table beside which this man was standing and stretched out her hand.
“Judge Whiting?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the Judge.