“Nope—pine tar!” jerked the Cub, uncertain whether to laugh or resent this catechising, but deciding on the former.
“Honour bright, nothing else?”
“Honour bright!”
“Then here’s your pipe!” cried Lucy gayly, to the further mystification of Brooke, who could not interpret the by-play. “Your birthday is half a year off and Christmas is past; what comes next? Why St. Valentine’s Day, of course! It’s a present for that with Pam’s love and my—respects for your fortitude!” Then, rummaging in the front of her blouse, the present and only pocket universal allowed women by fashion, she drew out a leather case that enclosed a meerschaum of really beautiful curve, the bowl being the carved head of the bull terrier!
Then Brooke understood, and locking her arms in those of the other two, they slid her between them as they ran up and down an icy bit on the side road, while the Cub further suggested a good coast down the river slope on an improvised bob-sled after dinner.
But after dinner and its dishwashing, in which Lucy gayly took part, the two young women ensconced themselves so snugly before the library fire that it would have taken a stronger lure than a whiz down ever so smooth a hill to drag them forth. Then they talked woman’s talk, and Brooke found herself gradually asking for people, as from the distance of another world, that two months ago she had met in almost daily intercourse; while the strangest part of all was the fact thus borne in upon her that a scant dozen, perhaps, were all among the throng who had been bound by kindred tastes which make the enduring sympathy called friendship. The rest were merely incidents, the floating clouds of summer skies bred and born of the caprice of social wind and weather.
“By the way, Brooke,” said Lucy, after they had travelled the old paths once more in company, “what did you do with those two thin keys that Tom Brownell picked up from under the rug the day I escorted him from your apartment at the St. Hilaire? I gave them to you afterward. Don’t say that you have lost them!” and, as Brooke hesitated, Lucy sat up straight with a look of alarm.
“Oh, no, they are quite safe in a box in my drawer, though they are nothing to bother about, for they do not belong to anything of ours, and both your father and our lawyer said that they fitted no business desk or box of father’s.”
“That may be,” said Lucy, guilelessly, “but Tom Brownell asked me particularly if I would beg you to lend them to him. You see he has a sort of genius for fitting odd numbers together, and finding those ownerless keys as he did, they seem to have fascinated him strangely.”
“Tom Brownell,” mused Brooke; then, becoming in her turn suddenly all on the alert, she continued: “Why, he was that reporter who contradicted the story of father’s feigned illness in the Daily Forum, was he not? And pray, where did you stumble over him again?”