“On time, Erminie!” he greeted gayly as he helped her from the car almost before it came to a stop. “Good girl!”
“Isn’t it perfect?” She met his frank gaze cordially. “Just warm enough, and the moon is full.”
The week had been a hard one for her. She had struggled to hold the goodwill of Jim Barney without allowing him the familiarities he had once enjoyed; familiarities she would allow no boy after knowing Billy. She was anxious that Billy’s side in both school and playground politics should win, but she knew the only way she could help him was to remain good friends with Jim.
She used her utmost subtlety to exact from him a pledge of civility toward Billy and Hector, and found this was the hardest bit of management she had ever undertaken. The Kid was as keen as she was, and had a half womanish intuition that matched her own. And Erminie could no longer juggle with the truth as formerly; it hurt her. When taxed with undue interest in Billy, her denials did not ring true; and her witty sallies ridiculing Jim were half-hearted. Had he been less in love, or Erminie less than altogether beautiful and charming, she would have made no impression.
Billy had looked forward to this day as one of reckoning. With this in view he had insisted that Erminie go to the picnic with him openly. “Don’t you frame up to go with Jim,” he had whispered days before, in a moment of waiting in the rain for a car at the school corner; “I won’t stand for it this time; I’ve things to say to you.”
“Oh! It’s good to be with you once more, just us two,” she said, as they went aboard, and forward to the very peak of the bow of the steamer.
But there was too much hilarity for any two, however absorbed, to remain unnoticed.
“Oh, here you are, Fishie!” one jolly girl shouted, and bore down on them, dragging in her train others with boys following. “We don’t need spoons at this picnic! Come on, you—the boys are going to get the band to play so we can dance.” She pulled Erminie to her feet; and shortly two or three dozen couple were whirling around on the crowded deck.
Erminie and Billy took a turn or two and dropped out, preferring to wait for the ampler room and smoother floor of the pavilion. Yet when they sought their places forward again, and the music and preoccupation of the dancers isolated them almost as much as walls would have done, neither of them could speak of what was uppermost in both minds. The hour and the surroundings were not propitious.
Billy fretted inwardly. There was much to say. She must know all his plans; all he had thought and dreamed since that evening—was it only a few days ago?—in the park, that evening that had changed all his life. Still these were serious matters, even sacred. He could not bring himself to mention them here, where unsympathetic eyes might read his emotions in his face; he was not an adept at hiding them as Erminie was.