“Hi! Hi! Aren’t you going to look around? Jess Morse!”
A girl smaller than herself, and dressed from neck to heels in a glistening raincoat, ran under Jess’s umbrella and seized her arm. She was a laughing, curly-haired girl with dancing black eyes and an altogether roguish look.
“Jess Morse! don’t you ever look back on the street—no matter what happens?” she demanded.
“For what was Lot’s wife turned to salt, Bobby?” returned Jess, solemnly.
“For good! Now you know, don’t you?” laughed Clara Hargrew, whose youthful friends knew her as “Bobby.”
“Why aren’t you at the ‘big doin’s’ to-night,” demanded the harum-scarum Bobby. “You’re a Mother of the Republic; what means this delinquency?”
“Just supposing I had something else to do?” returned Jess, trying to speak lightly. “I’m on an errand now.”
She wished to shake Bobby off. She dared not take her into Mr. Vandergriff’s store. Suppose the butter and egg man should treat her as the grocer had?
“Say! you ought to be up there,” cried the unconscious Bobby. “I just came past the house and it was all lit up like—like a hotel. And Mr. Sharp was just coming out with Mrs. Kerrick. Mrs. Kerrick is going to do something big for us girls of Central High.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jess, only half interested in Bobby’s gossip.