“Give you something to eat—not that only, make you eat it! I gave you enough at dinner time, if you had only eaten it, but you left all my goody-goodies untasted.”
“And you unthanked,” added Mell, with a ghost of her old smile, and a soupçon of her old sprightliness.
“No matter about that! Only, I was worried that you could not eat, and I know the reason why.”
Did he? Did he know it? The girl at his side dreaded to hear his next words.
“Miss Josey had been working you to death all the morning. I saw you how you stayed around and looked after everything, while Miss Josey sat on one side with her hands folded. She’s good at that! She never does anything herself but reap all the glory of other people’s successes. The very worst of these picnics is, that a few do all of the work, and the many all the enjoying. Now, you—you haven’t had much of a time, have you?”
She had not, but no girl in her right mind is going to confess, out and out, that she hasn’t had a good time, even in the Inferno.
“Rather slow, perhaps,” answered Mell, putting it as mildly on a strained case, as the case would bear, “but there’s nobody to blame for it, but myself. If I wasn’t such a fool in some respects, I might have had a—a perfectly gorgeous time. You would have given me all the good time a girl need to look for.”
“But you wouldn’t let me!”
“Well, you see,” explained Mell, warming with her subject, “I had promised Miss Josey—”