“Suppose I do some guessing,” meaningly said Chet.
“Why not?” countered Betty; but fortunately for Betty’s not having to respond to Chet’s surmises, one of the girls, a pretty shepherdess, came up to look more closely at Betty’s costume.
“If I had only thought of it, I might have been a real valentine, too,” regretfully said the shepherdess.
But events, the mingling, the talking, the varied entertainment arranged by Marcella Waite and her assisting sorority, moved rapidly. Betty was soon found by the colonial gentleman of her valentine, and formally escorted to the dining-room, spacious, and accommodating, tables arranged into one continuous and festal board, “like double T’s,” Betty said. “Oh, isn’t it pretty!” she exclaimed softly to Larry.
From the hanging lights above ran ribbons, gay in color and abounding, like everything else about the house, in appropriate decorations. The place cards were especially pretty. Betty’s represented Cupid carrying a cluster of hearts as well as his bow and quiver full of arrows. Below him was the outline of a single heart and within this an individual four-line “poem” ready for Betty’s reading:
“Sweet and pretty and dear and fine,
She’s a peach of a girl—Miss Valentine!
Let Eros whisper, as flies his dart,
‘Your lover is waiting and waits your heart.’”
Betty dimpled as she read, “I wonder if Marcella copied that or made it up. It doesn’t sound like her.”
“It wouldn’t,” said Larry, who had been reading his own lines. “She didn’t write them; but she did pretty well with mine in the hurry she was tonight. See? It’s a prophecy, I hope. I’m not sure that Marcella knows that Eros is the same as Cupid.”
“Larry Waite! Of course she does. But you haven’t read mine yet, how do you——”
Betty stopped, for Larry turned a mischievous look upon her, then sobered. “I wasn’t in fun when I scribbled those lines, Betty,” said he. But it was no place in which to embarrass Betty and he quickly placed his own card before her. “Read what Marcella tells me,” and Betty read: