"Good-morning, little Pat. What time is it?"
"I did wake you up, then. It's terribly early—for me. Only nine. Aren't you surprised to hear me?"
"Not a bit."
"Oh! You expected me to call up. Boasting, aren't you? I didn't intend to call you."
"But I intended to call you. What changed your mind?"
"Oh, I don't know," she said evasively. "I woke up early myself, and I suppose I felt lonely. When are you coming out?"
"Just as soon as I can get there."
Her soft, elfin chuckle was the reception which this announcement got. "Quick, then! I want awfully to see you now. And I might change my mind later."
Throughout the hurried processes of dressing while he breakfasted, Scott strove to quiet and command his thoughts, to find some clue to this tangle of passion wherein he had become ensnared. Incredible that he should so have lost himself, after the warning of the earlier experience. She, too, had been carried beyond her depth by a feeling presumably uninterpretable to her inexperience; so he believed. True, she had been through sentimental encounters before, by her own admission, but he too fatuously assumed that these were of minor and transient import, that it had remained to him to awaken her. "Boasting," Pat would have said.
She was awaiting him in the music room. "I thought you were never coming," she sighed. "But the others aren't up yet." She half lifted her arms, expectant, enticing.