Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/62

 the words of a song. At the chorus he discreetly stopped, to the laughter of the group.

Perhaps he saw Kay at the window, and there was deliberate malice in what he did next, for the new girl from Judson appearing with a dishpan, he promptly called to her.

"Come on out here, pretty one! Come out and give the sun a treat."

She came, giggling, and he threw an arm about her and waved his free hand at the landscape.

"Ain't that pretty?" he said. "Just you and me and nature, eh! Don't count those roughnecks over there."

The next moment, having made his effect, he released her and forgot her. But Kay recoiled into the room and held her hands to her burning face.

"He's crazy," she thought. "Crazy and wild. Maybe bad too, for all I know. I've got to get out of this somehow, or I'll go crazy too."

But it is typical of her state that within the next few minutes she was seeing it for the bravado it largely was, and that he was in his own way returning hurt for hurt. Up to that time she had not considered Herbert in the situation, but during the meal—Mrs. Dowling was lunching upstairs—she was suddenly certain that Herbert was responsible. It would be like him, she reflected, not to come to her, but to go as indirectly as possible to her father. Somebody had certainly gone to him. Well, she would soon find out.

"I suppose you think you did a good job last night," she began, resting her chin in her hands and staring across at him.

"As to what?"

"You know well enough. It was you who spoke to father. He never notices such things himself."

"Then you're wrong. It was he who brought up the subject."

"And you didn't help it any."