This apology meant a great deal, coming, as it did, from Amy, but the tall, pale girl seemed scarcely to notice. She accepted the five one-dollar bills, giving her own five-dollar note in exchange. Amy stuffed the bill in her pocket, and with a muttered word of thanks the stranger turned and walked off swiftly. She did not turn back, and in another moment a street corner hid her from view.
“I must say she isn’t very polite,” grumbled Amy, as Burd joined them. “After humbling my perfectly good pride in the dust and everything. Imagine me apologizing!”
“If I had not seen it I certainly would not have believed it,” agreed Jessie, cheerfully, and Amy shot her an injured look.
“You mean heard it,” she corrected frigidly. “If I cared to be unkind, my dear, I might remind you that an apology can never be seen!”
Burd went with them as far as the Norwood place in Roselawn. There he left them, intimating that he and Darry had important business in town and would not see them till later.
“Make it as much later as you like,” Amy told him cheerfully. “We shan’t pine away and die in your absence.”
As a matter of fact, the girls were far too busy for the remainder of that afternoon to give the boys more than a passing thought. They chattered like magpies of the possible trip to Forest Lodge while, with skilful fingers, they overhauled the radio set which Jessie and Amy themselves had set up in the pretty and spacious living room of Jessie’s own suite of rooms in the Norwood house. Jessie had brought a new detector from town and was bent upon trying the effect of it upon her set without delay.
“We must be ready for the special radio concert to-night,” Jessie reminded her, when Amy protested against the “hard labor” her friend imposed. “It wouldn’t do to miss it, and you know this detector is working badly.”
Mrs. Norwood, known fondly to her daughter, and to most of her daughter’s intimate friends as well, as “Momsey,” was away from home that afternoon—a matter of great regret to Jessie, who had hoped to talk over with her at once the invitation for Forest Lodge and ask her consent to the project.
It was late before she returned, and by that time the girls had “jacked up” the radio set until it was working perfectly. They fell upon Mrs. Norwood simultaneously, bombarding her with facts and questions until Mrs. Norwood laughed in helpless bewilderment and begged them to begin all over again from the beginning and “go slowly.” This they did, and had hardly finished when the telephone bell rang.