“Ate all the dinner, drank all the grape juice, stepped on all the custard pies, upset all the cream bottles. Oh, you piker, get out!” Trench aimed an empty lunch-basket at Vic's head with the words.
Being a chaperon was a pleasant office to Professor Burgess today but for the task of throwing a barrier about Elinor every time Vic Burleigh came near. And Burleigh, lacking many other things more than insight, kept him busy at barrier building.
“Miss Wream, you can't think of climbing that rough place,” Burgess protested, with a sharp glance of resentment at the big young fellow who dared to call her Elinor.
The tiger-light blazed in the eyes that flashed back at him, as Vic cried daringly.
“Oh, come on, Elinor; be a good Indian!”
“Don't do it, Miss Wream,” Vincent Burgess pleaded.
Elinor looked from the one to the other, and the very magnetism of power called her.
“I mean to try, anyhow,” she declared. “Will you pick me up if I fall, Victor?”
“Well, I wouldn't hardly go away and leave you to perish miserably,” Vic assured her, and they were off together.
The Wream men were slender, and all of them, except Lloyd Fenneben, the stepbrother, wore nose glasses and drank hot water at breakfast, and ate predigested foods, and talked of acids and carbons, and took prescribed gestures for exercise. The joyousness of perfect health was in every motion of this young man. His brown sweater showed a hard white throat. He planted his feet firmly. And he leaped up the bluffside easily. If Elinor slipped, the strength of his grip on her arm reassured her, until climbing beside him became a joy.