Rosie looked at him, scandalized and shocked. "Why, Tom Sullivan, how you talk! You ought to be ashamed o' yourself!"
"Well, you don't!" Tom insisted doggedly.
Rosie, drawing herself away from a person of such free-and-easy morals, returned to the backs of the last couple to see whether their little drama had completed itself. As she looked, the final act opened. The man whispered something—from what happened when all the other men had whispered something, Rosie decided he must be asking the girl if she were chilly. She, like all others before her, presumably was, for the man took off half his coat, the half near her, and drew it around her shoulders. What became of his shirt-sleeved arm, or what, in fact, thereafter became of the rest of both of them, no mere onlooker could ever know. The half-coat, raising high its collar, served as an effectual screen against the gaze of a curious world, and the only thing left for a student of human nature was to hunt a new couple.
One of the marvels of a picnic boat is that there are always new couples. Rosie found one immediately and was already engrossed in it when Tom Sullivan, clutching her excitedly, cried out:
"Look! Look! Didn't I tell you!"
Rosie looked, and what she saw seemed for a moment to make her heart stop. George Riley and Janet McFadden—think of it! How long the exhibit had been going on Rosie knew not, but Tom Sullivan had discovered them just as Janet's profile was rising and George's descending. In another instant——
"There!" shouted Tom Sullivan in triumph. "Didn't I tell you so! Now you can't say they're engaged!"
Rosie stood up hurriedly.
"This is a perfectly horrid boat and I wish I could get off! And I tell you one thing, Tom Sullivan: I'm going downstairs. I won't stay up here any longer. It's disgraceful, that's what it is!"
"Aw, don't go down!" Tom begged. "It's fun up here."