"What a pity it is he can't be here to see?" gasped Ruth.
"Oh, he sees enough, never you fear," Nan assured her. "When one casts sheep's eyes like that they hit even in the dark! Poor thing! She is such a goose. Last night when he told her he was going to-morrow she grew quite tragic and—"
"O Nan! How could you listen?" cried Ruth in a shocked voice but immediately after going into another spasm of laughter.
"She quotes Shakespeare at him," gasped Nan, convulsed with mirth, and not a bit abashed. "You ought to hear. It's rich!"
"Well, we must see that the coast is clear to-night for I s'pose she will be particularly touching, and Helen is getting awfully hard to manage. It wouldn't do to interrupt them at the last minute just when he was getting pathetic maybe. I wonder what he'll do?"
"He'll be real dignified," declared Nan, solemnly. "You wait. He'll be eloquent even if he is 'only a boy' as she says."
So the two girls disappeared utterly after dinner, and when Mr. Newcomb arrived he found Miss Webster quite alone, for Helen also was nowhere to be seen.
"She hasn't been very well lately," Miss Webster explained. "She looks terribly pale and anxious and I'm afraid she has something on her mind. Her headaches worry me!" and then she fell back into her poor, little artificial manner again and sighed and looked sentimental and was altogether "idiotic" as Nan would have said, and their two low-pitched voices could be heard murmuring away in the stillness until poor Helen, who was really half sick with a nervous headache upstairs, could have cried with irritation and pain.
She sat up on the bed when Ruth came into the room, and attacked her at once.
"I can't stand it another minute. It's driving me wild!"