All during the ice cream and cake part of the entertainment the young performers were fêted and congratulated, till they began, as Roy expressed it, "to feel themselves some punkins."
It was late before the last guest had departed, still laughingly bandying jests back and forth, and the Little Captain and the group of her particular chums and followers were left alone. Then—
"I wish it were beginning all over again," said Amy, leaning her head against a pillar of the porch and gazing dreamily up at the stars. "I never had such a good time in my life."
"It seems to me I'm always saying that," sighed Betty, sinking into the hammock, and laughing up at Allen, as he stood before her. "It's wonderful when life is just a succession of good times."
"Betty," he answered, sitting down beside her, and finding her hand under cover of the darkness, "that's my one ambition—to make life for you just a 'succession of good times.'"
"But I guess that never happens to anybody," she said, trying to speak lightly. "And I don't know that just having good times is a very big ambition. No—I—didn't mean that, Allen," she added quickly, seeing she had hurt him. "You've always been altogether too good to me. I—I guess I don't deserve it."
"There's nothing half good enough for you," said Allen fervently. "Betty," he added, after a slight pause, "I—I may have to go away pretty soon, and before I go I want you to know——"
"Say, Allen, are you going home like a respectable citizen, or shall we have to use force?" It was Roy who accosted him, and Allen muttered something under his breath.
"I'm going home when I get good and ready," he was beginning, when
Betty herself jumped to her feet and held out a hand to him.
"It is getting late," she said, "and we're all going to meet to-morrow, anyway, so we won't even say good-bye. Au revoir, everybody. It's been such a night!"