Her first impulse was to pause close beside the girl, to tell her that she had heard much about her; that she longed to aid her; that she and the lady cop would help her; that if she would but allow it they would explain life to her; that in the end they would restore the rubies to their proper place.
“But she is rich,” thought Florence, with a quick intake of breath. “I am poor. Her family is in society. I will never be.”
Ah, yes, “society,” that mysterious something to which people have given this name. She did not understand it. There was a barrier. She must not speak. So she passed on. And the twilight deepened into night.
She was just turning the prow of her boat toward the lights of home when a speed boat came roaring by. Just as they were opposite her, the searchlight from a larger boat played for an instant on the faces of those in the speed boat. She recognized them instantly.
“Green Eyes, Jensie Jameson, and that boy who sometimes rides in the ‘Spank Me Again’!” she exclaimed beneath her breath. “So she is truly here. Could it have been they who ran us down that night?
“Green Eyes, perhaps. But not that boy. I’d trust him anywhere.”
Yet, even as she thought this, she was tempted to question her judgment.
“Surely,” she told herself, “I have placed every confidence in other persons, and in the end have found them unworthy. Why not this boy?”
She rowed silently and rather sadly back to their little dock. Surely this was a puzzling world. Perhaps, after all, she understood it as little as the “poor little rich girl,” back there in the canoe.