Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/143

132 "Now, Mr. Halket, you are the tease!" exclaimed Letty. Floyd turned round to her with a sober face.

"You'd tell me, would n't you, if you really minded?" he said.

"Why, yes, of course—oh, my goodness, what am I to say!" cried Letty. "Well, you certainly are the tease!"

"I suppose," Floyd said to Mrs. Bell, "your daughter would tell us if we are taking a road that's familiar?"

Mrs. Bell began to giggle, and Letty cried in despair, "Well, if you are n't the tease!"

Returning home by a different road, they came past the grounds of the Avalon Country Club, and Floyd was pointing out the golf links and tennis-courts when a young woman driving in a high-wheeled cart dashed through the gateway toward them. It was Lydia, and as Floyd raised his hat her glance of surprise followed hard on that of recognition. She slowed up to say, "You're coming to luncheon?" and to get his answer, "Yes;" then she drove smartly on.

"Funny, is n't it," Floyd remarked to his companions, "that I should meet the lady I'm going to lunch with away out here."

Letty wanted to ask him who the girl was, sure that she must be one of those enviable persons whose names were so familiar to her in the society column of the Avalon Sunday Eagle. As she said to her mother afterwards, she was "dying to know," and Mrs. Bell confessed to a like curiosity. But though Floyd could be so free in teasing Letty about Hugh, she did not dare to question him flippantly in the same way—especially when he lapsed for a while into an abstracted silence. It was not, however, long before he resumed his former buoyancy and drove with what seemed to Mrs. Bell a wild carelessness, turning about on his seat and chatting irresponsibly with her and Letty. And afterwards, when he had driven them home and left them, and they were talking over the experi-