His tone was oratorical, and Lydia was impressed. She forgot that
Billy smelled of the barnyard.
"Well," she said, "we'd all be proud of you if you were president, I can tell you."
"Would you be!" Billy's voice was pleased. "Then, Lydia, will you wait for me?"
"Wait for you?"
"Yes, till I make a name to bring to you."
Lydia flushed angrily. "Look here, Billy Norton, you don't have to be silly, after all the years we've known each other. I'm only fifteen, just remember that, and I don't propose to wait for any man. I'd as soon think of waiting for—for Adam, as for you, anyhow."
Billy rose with dignity, and without a word strode down the path to the gate and thence up the road. Lydia stared after him indignantly. "That old farmer!" she said to Adam, who wriggled and slobbered, sympathetically.
She was still indignant when John Levine arrived and found her toasting herself and the waffles for supper, indiscriminately. Perhaps it was this sense of indignation that made her less patient than usual with what she was growing to consider the foibles of the male sex. At any rate, she precipitated her carefully planned conversation with Levine, when the four of them were seated on the back steps, after supper, fighting mosquitoes, and watching the exquisite orange of the afterglow change to lavender.
The others were listening to Lydia's account of her investigating tour with Charlie.
"I shouldn't say it was the best idea in the world for you to be wandering through the woods with that young Indian," was Levine's comment when Lydia had finished.