"What's the use," demanded Roger, "of your going around like dizzy antelopes at this time of day when you don't have to take the boat until two o'clock?"
"You'd be doing it yourself if you were going," retorted Ethel Brown. "Somehow it spreads out the fun."
"For you," growled Roger. "For us stay-at-homes it flaunts your good luck in our faces—no, I didn't mean that," he added quickly as he saw a shadow grow in Ethel Blue's sensitive eyes. "Honest, I'm mighty glad you kids have got the chance to go. Of course I am. I was only fooling."
"I do wish you and Helen were going too," answered Ethel Blue. "It would be lots nicer."
Roger saw that he had made a mistake by insisting on his misfortune, a mistake that often is made when we try to be funny, and he laid himself out to be especially nice to the girls. He took every care of them, carrying their bags, passing them through the gate and helping them on to the boat with as much formality as he would have shown to his mother and grandmother.
Though not long, it was a pleasant sail from Chautauqua to Mayville. The boat touched at Point Chautauqua on the other side of the lake where a group of summer-boarder young people were saying "Good-bye" to a friend with many loud exclamations of grief. The boys wrung imaginary tears from their handkerchiefs and one of the girls pretended that she required a tub that was standing on the pier to contain the evidences of her woe.
The Ethels were hugely amused at this comedy and laughed heartily, while Roger, who was still in a serious mood, frowned and called it all "stupid."
At Mayville they had to walk the length of the pier, but at its head they found the station. Roger presented each of the girls with a magazine with which he had provided himself before leaving Chautauqua, and a box of candy and a package of sandwiches gave them the wherewithal for afternoon tea if they should become too hungry for endurance before they reached Buffalo.
"Afternoon tea without the tea," smiled Ethel Brown.
"I do wish Mrs. Jackson had asked you," repeated Ethel Blue as Roger helped her up the steps of the car.