Albert, taken by surprise, stammered that he didn't know that he was sad. Miss Kelsey laughed merrily and declared that everyone who saw him knew it at once. “Oh, excuse me, Madeline,” she added. “I forgot that you and Mr. Speranza had not met. Of course as you're going to live in South Harniss you must know him without waiting another minute. Everybody knows everybody down here. He is Albert Speranza—and we sometimes call him Albert because here everybody calls everyone else by their first names. There, now you know each other and it's all very proper and formal.”
The young lady who was her companion smiled. The smile was distinctly worth looking at, as was the young lady herself, for that matter.
“I doubt if Mr. Speranza knows me very well, Jane,” she observed.
“Doesn't know you! Why, you silly thing, haven't I just introduced you?”
“Well, I don't know much about South Harniss introductions, but isn't it customary to mention names? You haven't told him mine.”
Miss Kelsey laughed in high delight. “Oh, how perfectly ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Albert—Mr. Speranza, I mean—this is my friend Miss Madeline Fosdick. She is from New York and she has decided to spend her summers in South Harniss—which I consider very good judgment. Her father is going to build a cottage for her to spend them in down on the Bay Road on the hill at the corner above the Inlet. But of course you've heard of THAT!”
Of course he had. The purchase of the Inlet Hill land by Fletcher Fosdick, the New York banker, and the price paid Solomon Dadgett for that land, had been the principal topics of conversation around South Harniss supper tables for the past ten days. Captain Lote Snow had summed up local opinion of the transaction when he said: “We-ll, Sol Dadgett's been talkin' in prayer-meetin' ever since I can remember about the comin' of Paradise on earth. Judgin' by the price he got for the Inlet Hill sand heap he must have cal'lated Paradise had got here and he was sellin' the golden streets by the runnin' foot.” Or, as Laban Keeler put it: “They say King Soloman was a wise man, but I guess likely 'twas a good thing for him that Sol Dadgett wasn't alive in his time. King Sol would have needed all his wisdom to keep Dadgett from talkin' him into buying the Jerusalem salt-ma'sh to build the temple on. . . . Um. . . . Yes—yes—yes.”
So Albert, as he shook hands with Miss Fosdick, regarded her with unusual interest. And, judging by the way in which she looked at him, she too was interested. After some minutes of the usual conventional summer-time chat the young gentleman suggested that they adjourn to the drug store for refreshments. The invitation was accepted, the vivacious Miss Kelsey acting as spokesman—or spokeswoman—in the matter.
“I think you must be a mind-reader, Mr. Speranza,” she declared. “I am dying for a sundae and I have just discovered that I haven't my purse or a penny with me. I should have been reduced to the humiliation of borrowing from Madeline here, or asking that deaf old Burgess man to trust me until to-morrow. And he is so frightfully deaf,” she added in explanation, “that when I asked him the last time he made me repeat it until I thought I should die of shame, or exhaustion, one or the other. Every time I shouted he would say 'Hey?' and I was obliged to shout again. Of course, the place was crowded, and—Oh, well, I don't like to even think about it. Bless you, bless you, Albert Speranza! And do please let's hurry!”
When they entered the drug store—it also sold, according to its sign, “Cigars, soda, ice-cream, patent medicines, candy, knick-knacks, chewing gum, souvenirs and notions”—the sextette of which Helen Kendall made one was just leaving. She nodded pleasantly to Albert and he nodded in return, but Ed Raymond's careless bow he did not choose to see. He had hitherto rather liked that young gentleman; now he felt a sudden but violent detestation for him.