“Will it?” Norma asked herself. There was no answer.
CHAPTER XVIII
SUDDEN PANIC
When Norma awoke, a half hour before her regular time, next morning, it was with the feeling of one who has had her little world of thought turned topsy-turvy.
“It is Lena who has done it,” she told herself.
Yet she could not hate Lena for that. It is not easy to hate any person who in the past twenty-four hours has saved your life. Lena, she was sure, had done just that. Neither she nor Betty could have brought the boat safely home through that storm.
And yet, when she had seen Lena in the big living room the night before, after dinner, and had tried to thank her, Lena had shrugged, mumbling something about, “All in a day’s work,” and “Handled a boat before,” then had walked away.
“You’d think she was a man,” Norma had said to Betty later. “That’s the way men talk.”
“We’ve given her rather a cold shoulder,” was Betty’s quiet comment. “It wouldn’t be surprising if she paid us back in cold shoulders.”
“Well,” Norma had started to reply, “perhaps we had reasons. We—” She had gone no farther and, appearing to understand, Betty had not encouraged her to continue.