Blanche gasped angrily, but offered no reply. She glowered at Ruth for an instant, then dropped her eyes. “If I did tell you, you’d go and tell her anyway,” she muttered.
“Perhaps I wouldn’t. I’d rather not if we can settle things between ourselves. That’s why I’m asking you to be frank with me.”
Something in the earnest words awoke Blanche to the fact that Ruth really did wish to help her, rather than expose her folly. “I suppose I’d better tell you,” she said sulkily. “My mother doesn’t know I’m engaged, and I don’t want her to. She forbade me even to be friends with Donald. She doesn’t allow him to call on me. That’s why I was anxious to get away from home this summer. I thought if I went to visit you, he could come to see me there and pretend to be my cousin. Then Miss Drexal changed things all around and upset our plans. So he came up here, and is staying in Lakeview.
“I thought I could see him once in a while and no one would know it. No one would have, either, if that old storm hadn’t come up. I was going to walk home from the place where I met him this morning. It’s about a mile from here. We drove to Lakeview and had luncheon there at a hotel. We left the machine there and walked all around the town. While we were driving back, the sky began to get dark. He was afraid I’d get caught in the storm, so he brought me almost home. I never thought you girls would come back that way,” she ended in an aggrieved tone.
Ruth’s feelings, as she listened to this tale, were decidedly varied. So this was the fabled axe that she had willingly turned the grindstone to sharpen. She had often heard Emmy privately refer to Blanche as “boy-struck.” It was also generally known among the Hillside girls that Blanche preferred the reading of sentimental fiction to study. It now appeared as though she had introduced Romance into her own life with a vengeance. For a long moment Ruth silently regarded the pouting features of the narrator.
“It seems to me,” she said slowly, “that it was a good thing we did come back that way. I am glad that none of the others saw you, though. You haven’t been fair with me, Blanche, but I’m going to give you a chance to be fair now. I want you to promise me that you will write to this young man to-night, telling him that you cannot see him again while you are here at the cottage.”
“But I can’t do that!” was the protesting cry. “He’d think me—”
“It’s not so much what he may think as what others will surely think of your deception,” broke in Ruth a trifle sharply. “In the first place, you have disobeyed your mother. Then, too, you owe it to Miss Drexal to write that letter. If you will write it, then I will agree to say nothing of this to anyone, provided you keep your word. You must see for yourself that you can’t go on meeting this young man outside the Heights without being found out by someone else in the cottage. Anyway, I wouldn’t allow you to do it. It wouldn’t be fair to you, or your mother, or Miss Drexal. After you leave here to go to your own home, you are free to do as you choose, so far as Miss Drexal is concerned. But not until then. Why don’t you turn around and try to be a Camp Fire Girl in earnest, Blanche? You are too young to be thinking so much about love and all that nonsense,” Ruth entreated with sudden energy. “You’re just a schoolgirl like the rest of us.”
Blanche continued to scowl, but said nothing. She was not in the mood for advice. She was trying to decide which would be the lesser of two evils. Much as she disliked the idea of writing the letter Ruth demanded, she stood in far greater awe of Miss Drexal’s sure disapproval, should the registrar learn what Ruth had accidentally stumbled upon. She was also forced to admit to herself that Ruth’s logic was sound.
“If I promise not to see Donald again while I’m up here, will you promise not to write to my mother?” she sullenly compromised, as she glanced at Ruth’s set features.