“Did I?” archly.
“If you still doubt it, there’s the parasol!”
The mention of the parasol always silenced her.
CHAPTER X
That was one of many cruises, and the Blue Wing contributed not a little to the gayety of the waning days of summer at Mount Desert. It was the Blue Wing, too, that in early September brought the Wharton family, bag and baggage, southward to Philadelphia, where Mortimer Crabb lingered, hoping to exact a promise of marriage before Christmas. But Patricia would make no promises. She had a will of her own, her fiancé discovered, and had no humor to forego the independence of her spinsterhood for the responsibilities which awaited her. It was in this situation that Crabb discovered himself to be possessed of surprising virtues in tolerance and tact. Patricia, he knew, had many admirers. The woods at Bar Harbor had been, both figuratively and literally, filled with them, and most of them had been eligible. Jack Masters, and Stephen Ventnor, who lived in Philadelphia, were still warm in pursuit of the fair quarry, who had not yet consented to an announcement of her engagement to Crabb.
But these men caused him little anxiety. They were both quite young and quite callow and stood little chance with a cosmopolitan of Crabb’s caliber. But there was another man of whom people spoke. His name was Heywood Pennington, and for three years he had been off a-soldiering in the Philippines. It had only been a boy-and-girl affair, of course, and most people in Philadelphia had forgotten it, but from his well-stored memory Crabb recalled at least one calf-love that had later grown into a veritable bull-in-the-china-shop. It was not that he didn’t believe fully that Patricia would marry him, and it wasn’t that he didn’t believe in Patricia. It was only that he knew that for the first time in his life, his whole happiness depended upon that least stable but most wonderful of creatures, the unconscious coquette. Moreover, Mortimer Crabb believed firmly in himself, and he also believed that, married to him, Patricia would be safely fulfilling her manifest destiny.
But the Philippine soldier kept bobbing up into Crabb’s background at the most inopportune moments: once when the soldier’s name had been mentioned on the Blue Wing, and Patricia had sighed and turned her gaze to the horizon, again at a dinner at Bar Harbor, and later in Philadelphia, at the Club. Bit by bit Crabb had learned Heywood Pennington’s history, from the wild college days, through his short business career to the tempestuous and scarcely honorable adventures which had led to his enlistment under a false name in the regular army three years ago. It was not a creditable history for a fellow of Pennington’s antecedents, and when his name was mentioned, even the fellows who had known him longest, turned aside and dismissed him with a word.