She could not articulate her disgust. Of all the perfectly useless fellows she had ever heard of, Ralph took the palm!
Without uttering another word the girl left the room and the house. Ralph had managed to spoil everything, after all. He had not gone to Clinkerport and telephoned to Harbor Bar. The tongue of scandal would not be stilled as she had hoped it might. And Lorna Nicholet considered it quite scandalous for her friends to believe that she and Ralph Endicott were "as good as engaged."
"I'll never forgive him! I'll never forgive him!" she cried over and over, as she tramped back to the light.
She made no comment then to either Miss Heppy or Tobias about what she had found at the house. She did not even notice the old lightkeeper's sly glances. He had followed Ralph's footprints by lantern-light in the storm the night before and knew where the young man had taken shelter after being driven from the lighthouse by Lorna's sharp tongue.
Endicott did not appear that day at the Twin Rocks Light. But he must have gone on to Clinkerport after Lorna's unexpected visit to the house on Clay Head aroused him, for the next day—the shell road having become passable again for motor cars—he came out with a truck from the garage to tow his roadster into town.
"You can go back with the garage man and me, and I will hire a car to take you home to Harbor Bar to-night," Endicott said sullenly enough, to Lorna.
"I will go to Clinkerport with the garage man," the girl promptly rejoined. "But you need not bother about me after I arrive there. I can manage to get home by myself. The trains are running."
"Well, I telephoned your Aunt Ida I would bring you home," he said gloomily. "They—they were some stirred up about us."
"They need be stirred up no further about us. I tell you I have got through with you, Ralph Endicott—for good and all! I will not be forced by my family to endure your company."
"It's fifty-fifty," he rejoined. "You don't have to ride any high horse about it. I'm no more pleased with the prospect of catering to your whims, I assure you."