Page:Bobbie, General Manager (1913).djvu/337



T was five months later, sometime during the last of September, that I again heard directly from Ruth and her love-affair with Breckenridge Sewall.

Miss Kavenaugh, the dollar-and-a-half-a-day university seamstress, had come to help me with my muslin curtains. Miss Kavenaugh is a very much-sought-after lady, and when I am able to secure her for a day, I give up everything else, sit down and sew with her. She plans, cuts and bastes, and I run the chain-stitch machine like mad. We had been working since eight A. M. in my darling new bedroom that looks out on my row of late dahlias. I could hardly keep my eyes on the machine-needle because of the distracting flame of several maple-trees against some dark green cedars across the lake. Will and I had been in our new house about two weeks and we adored it! I was perched on the step-ladder at the particular moment the telephone bell rang, hanging the last muslin curtain in the room we called Ruth's. Miss Kavenaugh was puttering with the cretonne overhangings, pulling and patting them as tenderly as if they had been dainty dresses hung up on forms.

It was Ruth on the telephone calling me from town.

"I'm in here shopping," she said. "Can you possibly come in and have lunch? Do, if you can. I want to see you."

Now whenever Ruth did honour me with an invitation to luncheon it was in quite a different manner.