Lucile Triumphant Part 24

"I tell you I don't know myself, so how can I tell you?" cried Lucile, angry at herself for being so confused.

"If you don't know whom it's from, why do you get all red and snappy and try to hide it?" asked Evelyn, triumphantly. "'Fess up, Lucy. You might as well, first as last, for you can't fool us."

"Methinks," began Jessie, in deep, stentorian tones, "that this writing seems strangely familiar. Where can I have seen it before? Ah, I have it!" Then, suddenly throwing her arms about Lucile in a strangling hug, she cried, "Oh, I knew it, I knew it! I knew he would just go crazy about you, like all the rest of us. He couldn't help himself! And you never, never would believe anything could happen the way it does in novels--oh--oh----"

"Oh, I see it all! I see it all!" shouted Evelyn, suddenly springing up and whirling about the room, using her letters as a tambourine. "It's Jessie's cousin! He's gone--he's gone----"

"Girls, you are crazy, both of you!" cried Lucile, extricating herself with difficulty from Jessie's strangle hold and smoothing back the hair that was tumbling down in the most becoming disorder--or so her two friends would have told you--while her laughing eyes tried hard to look severe. "Probably it isn't from him at all, and if it is, why--why--well, it is," she ended, desperately.

"Why, of course it is," soothed Jessie; "but I don't think you need worry about it not being from him----"

"Aren't you going to read it over now?" broke in Evelyn. "Then you can tell us----"

"I wouldn't tell you a thing," said Lucile, driven to her last entrenchment; "and what's more, I'm not going to read it till I get good and ready, and not then if I don't want to," and she slipped her letter into her pocketbook, which she closed with a defiant little snap. "Now, what are you going to do about it?" she challenged, gaily.

"We might use force," mused Jessie, meditatively.

"But you're not going to, because you can't," Lucile declared, raising a round little arm not yet wholly free from last summer's tan, for inspection. "Just look at that muscle," she invited.

"Terrific!" cried Evelyn, in mock terror. "Guess we'd better think twice before we tackle that, Jessie."

"Mere nothing!" sniffed Jessie, scornfully. "Now, if you want to see real muscle----"

"Oh, yes; we know all about that," said Lucile, and, throwing an arm about each of the girls, she dragged them over to the settee, saying gaily, "What's the use of having all this fuss about one old letter, when we have all the really good ones to read?"

The girls exchanged significant glances, but, never-the-less, followed Lucile's example, opening one letter after another amid a shower of exclamations, comments, questions and quotations from this or that letter, till the other disturbing doc.u.ment was all but forgotten--except by Lucile.

After half an hour of delightful reveling in the news from Burleigh, which seemed so terribly far away, and in tender little messages from mothers and fathers and friends, Lucile looked up from her guardian's letter, which she had just read for the third time.

"Girls," she said, seriously, "I'm glad the letters came just as they did this morning. I've been thinking----"

"So were we," broke in Evelyn, "just before you came in----"

"Wonderful!" murmured Jessie. "A red-letter day!"

The girls laughed, but Lucile went on:

"Just because we're over here, so far away from home, is no reason for our forgetting or neglecting the least little bit the rules of our camp-fire. In fact, I don't think we deserve any credit for being good where Mrs. Wescott is; you simply can't help yourself when our guardian is around."

"That's true enough," agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in camp--eating, swimming, walking, canoeing--subject always to the slightest word or wish of their lovely, smiling, cheery guardian, who always knew just what to do and just the time to do it.

"That's all right for me," began Jessie, heroically. "I've been eating candies and drinking sodas and reading so much that my eyes are nearly out of my head, but I don't know what under the light of the sun you two have done."

"Well, in the first place, I've become horribly rude," confessed Lucile.

"We haven't noticed it," said Jessie.

"Well, I have," she went on. "This morning an old lady dropped her handkerchief under my very eyes and I was in such a hurry to get to you that I didn't stop to pick it up. And all my clothes need mending. That good waist is all ripped where you yanked the b.u.t.ton off, Evelyn----"

"Oh, I did not," began Evelyn, hotly.

"All right. I don't care who did it; the fact remains that it is torn and I haven't mended it, and I haven't written half as much as I ought to, and--well, if I told you everything, I wouldn't get through to-day."

"And I use slang from morning to night, and I chewed a piece of gum that Phil gave me right out in the street, too," began Evelyn, miserably.

"Oh, Phil!" said Jessie, disdainfully. "He would ruin anybody's manners."

"All the more credit, then, in being good while he's around," laughed Lucile. "But, seriously, girls, don't you think it would be a good plan to make up our minds to act just the same all the time as though our guardian were in the next room?"

"Let's" said the girls. And so, with no more form or ceremony, the simple little compact was made, but it had taken firm and solid root, nevertheless, in the girls' hearts.

"Hooray, people; here comes the sun!" cried Phil, bursting in upon them with a box of candy and a radiant smile. "I just waylaid Dad and asked him what was up if it cleared this afternoon, and he said, 'Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, a look at the Thames, an auto ride.' Hooray!"

The girls ran to the window, and, sure enough, the sun was beginning to s.h.i.+ne, feebly and mistily, to be sure, but yet unmistakably.

They hugged each other joyfully and began to gather up their scattered belongings.

"It must be nearly lunch time," sang Lucile. "We'll go up and see what we look like and change our dresses and----"

"Then for the fun," finished Evelyn.

"I say, Jessie, here's the candy I promised you," Phil called after her.

Jessie turned at the door and eyed the tempting box longingly.

"I'd love to, Phil," she said, "but I can't. Thanks just as much. I would spoil my lunch," she added, lamely, making a hasty retreat.

"Well, of all the----" began Phil, at a loss to understand such insanity.

Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he voiced the eternal and oft-repeated masculine query:

"Aren't girls the limit?"

CHAPTER XVII

THE GLORY OF THE PAST

With light hearts and lighter feet the girls danced from the dark hotel to the sun-flooded street. Umbrellas had been down for half an hour and in some places the sidewalks were already partly dry. Smiles and friendly nods had once more become the fas.h.i.+on where before had been only grumbling discontent, with now and then a muttered, "Beastly rotten day, what?"

"Oh, what a dif-fer-ence!" cried Lucile, surveying the scene with delight. "I'd begun to be rather disgusted with London this morning, everything looked so dreary and forlorn. I wonder what can be keeping Dad and Mother," she added, turning to the hotel entrance, while her foot tapped impatiently. "They said they'd be with us right away--oh, here they are! Speaking of angels----"

"And they're sure to turn up," said Phil, producing himself with startling suddenness from nowhere. "Bet you can't guess where I've been."

"Why work when you don't have to?" philosophized Jessie. "If we don't care where you've been, why bother to guess?"

"All right; I won't let you in on the secret now, but when you do find out about it, you'll wish you had been more civil," Phil prophesied, darkly.