Both girls were dumfounded, as well they might be.
Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet-black lashes–girdled, moreover, with her father’s growing fame–Una, with lighter eyelashes and hair, and that little fixed star of angry excitement blazing in one sweet dark eye, they were the kind of girls whose good graces a boy would be the last to spurn, fair even for daughters of Columbia who, democratic in beauty, as in all else, never hatches out an ugly duckling.
They gazed in stormy bewilderment now after Jack at a Pinch walking off with his party whom, indeed, he had herded away.
Andrew was looking gloweringly after him, too.
“An’ so he’s the loon that sat in the Chair first!” grumbled the still angry chauffeur. “Aw weel–” the “dour” expression upon the speaker’s long upper lip softening a little–“weel! he may be ill-trickit, but he’s a swanky lad, for a’ that. Aye, fegs! an’ braw, too.”
“Oh! he’s ‘swanky’ enough–swaggering–but I don’t think he’s ‘braw’, handsome–not with that little stand in his eye–just like Una’s, only more so.” Pem added the last words under her breath. “But, oh! for goodness sake! let’s get away from here,” she cried wildly; “over to the other side of the Pinnacle, anywhere–anywhere–so that we won’t see him again, before his strutting over what he’s done, makes me–makes me–”
“Yes–it’s pretty on the other side of the hill, easy climbing, much smoother–green and spring-like,” assented Una soothingly, pouring balm. “It’s all covered with young pine trees and just a few, very few, tall silvery birches. Not rough and rocky as it is this side!” glancing shiveringly down the precipice.
“Not another Deev’s Chair in sight, I’ll be hoping–fegs!” muttered Andrew, picking up a basket which he had carried from the automobile up the low mountainside, and in the late emergency had set down.
It contained cocoa, sandwiches, fruit and other toothsome dainties for a picnic supper.
“We have permission to make a fire, a Pin-na-cle blaze, to–to boil water and toast our marshmallows. Oh! of all things, all-ll things on this planet–I don’t know what we may find on any other–that’s ‘banner’, it’s a marshmallows toast out-of-doors–isn’t it?” chanted Una, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub, as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too, now wore the “bonnie green”, the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse and captivating Tam-o’-shanter–most nymph-like note in dress for daughters of the woodland.