"We had a smash with the centre-board, you see," he explained. "Crash—just at tea-time. Izzard wanted to send it to Mazzicombe, but I told him they'd charge nearly as much as we gave for the beastly boat. So I'm doing it myself."
Then, as if his presence within the precincts of a horticultural college for young women was quite explained, he bent over his filing again. Louie, who had come for a couple of boards that had been put aside for her, took them and went out. She was twenty yards away when she heard the young man call slowly after her: "I say—I ought to carry those for you, you know——"
The boards were for her bed. This she had removed from the orchard. The new place lay quite beyond the orchard, at the foot of the hill between Chesson's and the sea. There, for the first time on the previous night, she had had the best of what breeze there was.
It had been the attitude of her fellow-students during the past month—or, more fairly, what she had conceived to be their attitude—that had caused her thus to remove herself.
It might be too much to say that she was still not as popular as ever. These things are not demonstrable. Popular she had been; now—well, it depended a little more than it had done. Burnett Minor, of course, would have eaten from the same plate with her by day and shared her bed at night had she been permitted—also had she not left for her vacation a fortnight before; but Burnett Major—Louie was not so sure about Burnett Major. Her attitude had been more than correct; it had been so correct that Louie had been put altogether in the wrong. The words, of course, had never been said, but Louie had imagined Burnett Major's private opinion to be as follows:—
"But why didn't she tell us sooner? What earthly difference does she suppose it would have made? Who cares about things like that? I dare say her father's just as good as anybody else's father; for that matter, mother's grandfather was only a farmer—mother told us so herself; but nobody likes being treated as if they were snobs. It showed a lack of confidence, that's what it showed; and I don't know—now—I mean no girl, unless she wasn't quite a lady, would——" Louie could supply that part too.
"I don't care—I love Causton!" she had also imagined B. Minor as having sobbed, bold and unconvinced. "He didn't sky the wiper when his beezer was bleeding, anyway!"
Yes: for Burnett Major, presentation and all the rest of it lay ahead.
Matters would probably have stopped at that had Louie herself allowed them to do so; but that would not have been like Louie. Allow them to stop there? Good gracious, no! Her cynicism had become bright indeed. She was not the girl to contaminate the innocent Burnett Minor; neither—for she was a Scarisbrick when all was said and done—was she going to be driven willy-nilly into the society of Richenda Earle as company good enough for her. She could look after herself, thank you. Coventry is no unpleasant place provided you have the putting of yourself there, and at any rate her Coventry at the foot of the hill was cooler at night than the other one. It meant carrying her mattress and bedding a little farther, but she had a prizefighter's physique to carry them with, which was more than her nearest neighbour, Elwell, the daughter of the Treasury mandarin, could say.
It is true that she did sometimes wonder (with Burnett Major, perhaps) whether she had not inherited also from the prizefighter something less desirable than his physique—a discontented and ill-conditioned nature. But that did not mend matters. It merely made her, if it did anything at all, distrustful of herself. And as this is the story of Louie, virtues and vices and all, her moods must go down with the rest.