"I'll wait exactly half an hour. Four-thirty to the minute. Not a second more."
"I do believe you're jealous, Jack Bedelle!" said Vivi expectantly.
"Jealousy has no part in my nature," said Skippy loftily. "Besides you can see it in my hand. Firmness, that's all!"
"Brute!" said Vivi with a killing glance.
She picked up the pink parasol and hastened down the beach. Skippy fished out the Philomathean Debating Society pin and slowly attached it to his vest. He switched to the vacated place with the back rest and began to whistle to himself. At the end of a seeming hour he glanced at his watch. Exactly seven minutes had elapsed.
"Half an hour was a mistake. Fifteen minutes is enough for a mut like Brownrigger. I should have been firmer. When a girl gets you to waiting for her—she has you going and coming. Firmer, I should have been much firmer!"
He slipped off his shoes to empty them of sand, and in doing so filled the gayly coloured work-bag that was Vivi's. His toilette finished, he took up the bag to clean it in turn. At the first touch as fate had decreed a book tumbled out and lay with opened pages before him. It looked most suspiciously like a diary. He averted his eyes and then his glance came slowly back to it.
"Here, that's not square," he said to himself angrily, torn by a mighty temptation. He leaned over and closed the book abruptly. The next moment he was staring at three gilded words that confronted him with the suddenness of Belshazzar's vision:
THE CHAP RECORD
A sudden brain storm swept over the emotional nature of Mr. Skippy Bedelle, of the sort which in modern legal etiquette is held to excuse all crimes. He knew what a chap record was. He had found one in his sister Clara's bureau and had been lavishly paid for his silence. He opened it violently and this is what he read: