Patricia retorted: “Beulah, I sometimes think that you like to stir up the embers in Gwyn’s nature, even when they are smouldering and might die if they were let alone.”
Instead of replying, the other girl exclaimed after a glance at her wrist watch: “Great moons! I must go back on a run! I have a French test at 4.”
Jenny took the reins and brought Dobbin to a stop. When they were in the road, Patricia asked: “May we come down and see you some day? I wanted to go out on that rocky point when we were there before, but when Gwyn’s along, everything has to be done her way.”
“I’d be glad to have you,” was Jenny’s sincerely given reply.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A NEW EXPERIENCE
May was a busy, happy month for Jenny. Never had she studied harder and her teacher, Miss Dearborn, rejoiced in her beloved pupil’s rapid advancement. Then, twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when she drove around to the beautiful country homes of the rich delivering eggs and honey, on the high seat at her side rode her very first girl friend, Lenora Gale. Jenny was jubilantly happy on these occasions, and, as for Lenora, she spent the hours in between the rides in anticipation of the next one or in dreaming over the last one. She wrote long letters to her far-away farmer father or to her nearer brother, Charles, telling all about this new friend who seemed to the readers of those letters to be a paragon indeed.
“I just know that you will love my dear Jenny when you see her,” she wrote indiscriminately in either letter, and Charles smiled to himself. He might like this Jenny Warner in a general way, but he was not at all afraid that he would “love” any girl in particular, soon or ever. He was convinced of that. He had met many girls, but he had never felt strongly appealed to by any of them, and since he would be twenty-one on his next birthday he decided that he was immune, but of this he said nothing in his letters to his beloved little sister, for he well knew that she did not refer to romantic love when she so often prophesied that her brother would love Jenny Warner.
But, as the weeks passed, Charles found that he was looking forward with a new interest to the middle of June, when he was to go to Santa Barbara to get his sister and take her, if she were well enough to travel, back to their Dakota farm for the summer.
As for Harold P-J. he had returned to the military academy jubilantly eager for the beginning of his duties as Farmer Warner’s “helper.” He wrote a long, dutiful letter to his mother each week, and, after that visit to Rocky Point, he told his plan for the summer not without trepidation and ended with a description of the flower-like qualities of the granddaughter: “Mother mine, there’s a girl after your own heart. You’ll just love Jenny Warner.”
Perhaps it was because of this letter that Mrs. Poindexter-Jones changed her plans and decided to leave for Santa Barbara at an earlier date.