“I’m going with Helen to dry my clothes,” the girl said in a low tone, “and if you could come for me in about half an hour in some sort of a vehicle, Lanky, I’d be ever so much obliged to you to take me up home.”
“Will I? Well, I guess yes, and glad in the bargain, Dora,” he replied, with a happy look that told her the bitterness had all gone out of his heart.
“You’ll forgive me being so unkind to you; won’t you, Lanky?” she continued, as Helen very considerately turned away.
“Never mention it again to me, Dora. I want to forget we ever had a falling out,” the boy went on, rapidly.
“And we’re going to be friends again, then, good friends like we used to be?” she continued, gladness in her voice.
“Better than ever—that is, if you care to have me take you around, instead of him,” Lanky replied suggestively, and her pretty face took on a very scornful look as she went on:
“Him! Oh! I despise him now, too much for me to tell you. I never did care so much for him, Lanky, and was only trying to make you believe I did. But to think of him willing to see me drown there! Oh! the coward! I never, never mean to even speak to him again!”
“Well,” said Lanky, feeling a little compunction in his generous heart toward the unlucky object of this girlish disdain; “p’raps he isn’t to blame so much after all, because he says he can’t swim even a little bit; and if that’s so, you know he couldn’t ’a’ helped you a whit, even if he had jumped over.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she persisted, girl-like; “if he’d been real brave, like some boys I know, he’d have jumped in, anyway. Why, I might have saved him then, don’t you see, Lanky? Mr. Walter Ackerman had better go and take lessons in swimming before he expects any Columbia girl to be his company again. They all know him now.”
Lanky looked at her a little queerly. He was in reality wondering whether, after all, the plucky girl might not have been pretending to be in greater peril than was actually the case, after finding herself dumped into the river, just to see which one of her boy friends would do the life-saving act. But he never knew whether there was any truth in this far-fetched idea or not.