"Of course, I didn't," I broke in. "We don't tell all we know when we go East."
"Nor all you have done in the East when you come back home, evidently," Tillhurst spoke significantly. "I've never heard him mention your name once, Miss Melrose."
"Has he been flirting with some one, Mr. Tillhurst? He promised me faithfully he wouldn't." Her tone took on a disappointed note.
"I'll promise anybody not to flirt, for I don't do it," I cried. "I came home and found this young educator trying to do me mischief with the little girl I told you about the last time I saw you. Naturally he doesn't like me."
All this in a joking manner, and yet a vein of seriousness ran through it somewhere.
Rachel Melrose was adroit.
"We won't quarrel," she said sweetly, "now we do meet again, and when I go down to Springvale to visit your aunt, as you insisted I must do, we'll get all this straightened out. You'll come and take tea with us of course. Mr. Tillhurst has promised to come, too."
The young man looked curiously at me at the mention of Rachel's visit to Springvale. A group of politicians broke in just here.
"We can't have you monopolize 'the handsome giant of the Neosho' all the time," they said, laughing, with many a compliment to the charming young monopolist. "We don't blame him, of course, now, but we need him badly. Come, Baronet," and they hurried me away, giving me time only to thank her for the invitation to dine with her.
At the Teft House letters were waiting for me. One from my father asking me to visit Governor Crawford and take a personal message of some importance to him, with the injunction, "Stay till you do see him." The other was a fat little envelope inscribed in Marjie's handwriting. Inside were only flowers, the red blossoms that grow on the vines in the crevices of our "Rockport," and a sheet of note paper about them with the simple message: