13. Frank Apologizes
Kit was doing some homework in the library one Saturday morning, when all at once she was conscious of someone who stood at the west end of the room, looking at her. For a moment Kit was absolutely speechless, not believing the evidence of her own eyes. But the next minute Billie’s own laugh, when he found out he had been discovered, startled her with its reality.
“Billie Ellis,” she exclaimed, springing to her feet and scattering reference books and notepaper helter-skelter. “How on earth did you ever get way out here?”
Billie colored slightly, as he always did at any display of emotion, and tried to act as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him to appear at Delphi, when he was supposed to be in Washington in school.
“We had our exams last week, and Frank had to come out to Minnesota for the government, so he took me along to help him.”
“Billie, are you really after bugs and things—I mean, are you going to really be a naturalist?”
“I guess you’d kind of call it being a business naturalist,” laughed Billie. “I don’t think I’ll ever live in a shack on a mountainside, and write beautiful things about them, now that I know Frank. You want to roll up your sleeves and pitch in like he does.”
“Is he here now?” asked Kit eagerly.
“Yep.” Billie nodded out of the window toward Kemp Hall, the boys’ dormitory. “After we found out that you didn’t live here, we were going on down to the Dean’s to find you, but he looked over the boys’ freshman class, and found he had a cousin or nephew or somebody on the list, Clayton Diggs.”