She hurried at once to the bowery and none were more sprightly and gay until the ten o'clock bugle sounded throughout the valley, and then she allowed Henry Boyle to accompany her to the tent where the elder ones still sat chatting and enjoying themselves.
Diantha Winthrop was pre-eminently sensible. She was sometimes annoyed with the frequent compliments she received as to this trait of her character. She was rarely angry with people; she never gossiped about anybody, and if she had nothing good to say, she rarely said anything at all. She was not impulsive, nor was she unduly swayed by her emotions, deep as they sometimes were. She acted upon mature thought, and only the few who were her intimate friends, really knew the value of her sterling character.
Henry begged his companion to stroll up the hill-side a little, just fairly out of range of the jokers by the camp-fire, and the girl was the more willing because of that other couple under the pines across the tiny valley.
"Here you are, Dian," cried out Rachel. "I was just wondering if you would not like to get that pop-corn and pop some for the crowd."
But Henry was still begging under his breath, for her to come up in the shadow of the pines, and away from the crowd.
"Can't Lucy and Josephine pop the corn, Rachel?" asked Dian, at last.
Both children protested their utter weariness.
"Ah, child," said young Boyle, patronizingly to little Lucy, "just pop the corn, like the leddy you are."
"I'm not a 'leddy'," flashed the child back, "and I don't think it's fair, so there."
"Don't cry," still teased the young fellow; "do be a good girl," then joking in his rather clumsy fashion, he added, "Come and kiss yoo papa."