No doubt that was what he was doing that minute: making love to someone else. A young man who looked like a Greek god was not going to be turned down by every girl. How good Lewis had always been to her and how well he had understood her! He thought she was cold and unfeeling now, she just knew he did. She had received no letters from him for weeks, at least it seemed weeks. Oh well, if he wanted to make love to other girls, why she wasn’t going to be the one to care!
“Douglas, I hear a auto a-comin’. If’n you don’t stop bawlin’ folks will see you.”
A car was coming! She could hear its chug as it climbed the hill half a mile off.
“Please wet my handkerchief in that little branch so I can wash my face,” she begged Bobby, while she smoothed her ruffled hair and wished she had one of Helen’s precious dorines to powder her red nose.
“Yo’ hankcher is as wet as water already. I don’t see what you want it any wetter for,” said Bobby, who might have quoted: “‘Too much of water hast thou, my poor Ophelia,’” had he known his Hamlet.
“I ain’t a-gonter be bad no mo’, Douglas,” declared Bobby as he brought the little handkerchief back from the brook dripping wet. “You mos’ cried yo’ face away, didn’t you, Dug?” and with that Douglas had to laugh.
“Feel better now?” he said with quite the big brother air. “That there car is jes’ roun’ the bend. I reckon if you turn yo’ face away the folks in it won’t know you is been a-bawlin’.”
The car slowed up, then stopped when the driver recognized Douglas, and Count de Lestis sprang out to greet her. The signs of the recent storm were still visible on her pretty face in spite of all the water Bobby had brought from the brook. Douglas tried to hold her head down so the count could not see her disfigured countenance, but such floods of weeping could not but be noticed.
“My dear Miss Carter, you are in distress!” He looked so truly grieved and anxious that already Douglas felt somewhat comforted. Sympathy is a great balm.