“Cheer up, old thing!” laughed Arnold. “To-morrow you’ll be as gay as a lark, won’t he, Toby?”
The third member of the party, who, next the window, had been occupied with a magazine for the last half-hour, turned a pair of very blue eyes toward the speaker and smiled. Although he had been following the story closely, the conversation of his companions had not been entirely lost to him, and Arnold’s question had reached him between the last word on page 19 and the continuation on an elusive page 134. “I’d never expect to see Frank as gay as a lark,” he replied readily. “If you had said as happy as a seagull, though——” He returned to the search for page 134.
“Seagull?” protested Arnold. “The silly things never are happy! They’re always crying and making a fuss.”
“Oh, they’re happy enough,” said the other, with a twinkle in his eyes, “but they don’t want to think so!”
Arnold laughed and Frank said, “You go to the dickens, Toby,” but grinned a little as he said it. There had been a time when he would have taken Toby Tucker’s jest not so amiably, but closer intimacy with that youth had rendered his dignity less tender.
“Toby’s got you sized up, Frank,” laughed Arnold. “You do like to grouch a bit, you know.”
“We all do, at times,” said Toby, comfortingly. He found the page he was seeking and settled back again. But Arnold plucked the magazine from his hands and tossed it to the opposite seat.
“We’re nearly in Greenburg, T. Tucker,” he said. “Sit up like a gentleman and talk to us.”
Toby looked reproachfully at his friend and regretfully at the magazine. Then he smiled. He had rather a remarkable smile, had Toby. It made you forget that his nose was too short, his chin almost aggressively square, his tanned face too liberally freckled, his hair undeniably red. It made him almost good-looking and eminently likable. Tobias Tucker’s smile was a valuable asset to him, although he didn’t know it.
“What shall I talk about?” he asked. “Want me to tell you a dreadfully funny story?”