"I really think, Jeff, I had better not come this evening," stammered Mr. Gordon, turning quite pale and showing extreme agitation. "I—I——"
"Now look here, Bob, you have accepted and we are going to expect you." The trolley arrived just then and we hurriedly got aboard while Zebedee shouted hospitable imprecations on the head of his old friend if he should fail to keep his word. "That was a strange way for Bob Gordon to behave," he said, sinking into the seat by me. "First he said he would come and seemed delighted and then when I cracked a joke about our poor, dear Blanche, he suddenly decided he had better not come. While poor, dear Blanche is certainly some dresser, she is very clean looking and has a good face, and I can't see anything about her to make a man behave as Bob did."
Zebedee always thereafter spoke of Blanche as "poor, dear Blanche," and there was something so ludicrous in his way of saying it that for the entire month we were at the beach and ever after, in fact, when our vacation of that July was mentioned, he could set all of us in a perfect gale by his "poor, dear Blanche."
I looked at Zebedee in amazement. He really seemed to think that it was Blanche who had made Mr. Gordon turn so pale and stammer so strangely. Men are funny animals. Here was Zebedee, a "so-called paw" of girls as old as I was, a man of the world and a newspaper man with a nose for news that was unsurpassed in the South, so my father thought, and still he had not had the intuition to see that his friend Bob had turned pale when he found Miss Cox was with us. I could have wagered anything that all the girls knew what was the matter, even Blanche. I said nothing to Zebedee, feeling perhaps that it would be a little unkind to Miss Cox to give voice to my convictions to a mere man, but I was dying to get with one of the girls and see if the subject would not be immediately broached.
Zebedee went out on the back platform to smoke and Dee made a dive for his seat. "Page, I'm dying to find out if you noticed Mr. Gordon's agitation over Miss Cox's being with us!"
"Surely I did!"
"Oh, isn't it exciting? And didn't she blush, though, when she said she never wanted to go to Norfolk?" So Dee had noticed that, too. "Dum thought it was because she had had some kind of love affair there three years ago and could not bear the place and all around it, but I kind of hoped maybe it was because the man lived there still. I wonder if he will come and if we had better warn her. I am so afraid she will run away if she finds out he is coming, and then the romance cannot be completed."
"Well, I think we had better keep out of it altogether and let your respected parent put his foot in it, which he is sure to do. He thinks Mr. Gordon held back because of Blanche's appearance."
"He doesn't! Well, of all the stupids! Got his start, too, as what he calls 'a gum-shoe reporter' doing detective work on his paper. If I had no more insight into human nature than that, I'd take to cracking rock as a profession," and Dee sniffed scornfully. She agreed with me that we would say nothing to Zebedee as it wouldn't be quite fair to our sex to gossip with a man about a love affair.
Annie and Mary had been as quick to see the possible romance as we had been, so we had to tell them of Miss Cox's agitation when Norfolk was mentioned, and one and all we pitied poor Zebedee's masculine blindness. We had always liked Miss Cox, but now we had a tenderness for her that amounted to adoration. Our surmises were many as to the reason for her separation from her lover.