"You'd better let Dolly Martin hear you say that."
Abraham Lincoln Todd straightened himself up in the most independent bachelor style.
"She can look after me when we're married, but in the meantime I'm a free man."
He is considered very handsome, tall and dark, a good business man too, and Belle had quite approved of the engagement between him and Dolly Martin, who, though not a pretty girl, was strong and sensible, and the daughter of one of her oldest friends.
Lincoln must be taking advantage of his intimacy with our family to flirt with Mary Mason.
Interlaken is not a fashionable resort. Even the hotel is a homely abode, which the guests seem to run themselves, though they generally prefer to live outdoors and go inside only for meals and beds. Once in a while, on a chilly evening, the young people get up a dance, and some of us older folks are dragged into it too.
Scotchmen love to dance, and I am no exception. I am not up to waltzing or any of the newfangled round dances, but give me a Highland schottische, or a square dance, when there is an inventive genius to call off the figures and prescribe plenty of variety. There was no professional caller-off at Interlaken, but Lincoln Todd did duty for one as he danced. When he tired of it, and led off into a round of waltzes, ripples, jerseys, bon tons, rush polkas, and goodness knows what besides, I remained as a wall-flower.
The reason that I sat there was that I could not take my eyes off Mary Mason. Where she learned to dance I know not, but dance she did, with a grace and abandon that made every other girl in the room a clod-hopper. Lincoln Todd was quite infatuated with her.
Ours is one of the dozen or so of cottages that radiate from the big hotel. Most of the cottagers take dinner and supper at the hotel, being, like ourselves, in a servantless condition. Belle said she could get along perfectly well without Margaret, when she had Mary Mason to help her with the housework, and, indeed, there was not much to be done. The four bedrooms open into one central room that we call the sitting-room, but it is only in wet weather it justifies the name, for, as a rule, we sit in rockers or swing in hammocks on the broad veranda that runs round three sides of the house. The cottages lie so close together that a good jumper can easily spring from one veranda to the next, and the lady proprietors gossip across, and the men too when they come down from business every evening, or from Saturday till Monday. My lot is generally the shorter allowance, and one Sunday afternoon I lay in my favorite hammock on the north side of the veranda, sleeping the sleep of the brain-tired editor, till voices roused me.
"Mary, where did you get that new tennis racket?"