A sudden silence fell on the cross-roads. It was Patsy who broke it at last. “Well?” A composite, interrogative stare came from the carful. Patsy laughed bewitchingly. “For a crowd of rascally kidnappers, you are the slowest I ever saw. Troth, in Ireland they’d have it done in half the time.”
The next instant Patsy was lifted bodily inside, and, amid a general burst of merriment, the car swung down the road.
It was a picnic lunch—an elaborate affair put up in a hamper, a fireless cooker, and a thermos basket; and it was spread on a tiny, fir-covered peninsula jutting out into a diminutive lake. It was an enchanting spot and a delicious lunch, with good company to boot; but, to her annoyance, Patsy found herself continually comparing it unfavorably with a certain vagabond breakfast garnished with yellow lady’s-slippers, musicianed by throstles, and served by a tinker.
“Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and food too hard to digest comfortably?” Gregory Jessup had curled up unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity.
“I was thinking about—Billy Burgeman.”
He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: “I can’t talk Billy with the others; I’m too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy’s character and motives.” He stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy’s face. “I believe a chap could turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you’d keep the contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault.”
Patsy smiled appreciatively. “Faith! you make me feel like Saint Martin’s chest that Satan himself couldn’t be opening.”
“What did he have in it?”