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She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the confidence of friends. Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had reduced them to silence.
The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant lumber and strewn with logs. Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began abruptly: "You may think it's pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk with you about Miss Simpson." She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her friend Barbara.
Yet, perhaps in the future as in the past, your pride may prove the stronger. It is for you and only you to decide. Good-bye, She had found this letter on her return from Little Langbourne. She had gone hurrying, as a young girl in her eagerness might, down to Mrs. Bonner's little cottage, to learn that she was too late. He had gone. Mrs. Bonner, with almost tears in her eyes, told her.
But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and he added: "What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New England." "We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts," Miss Simpson suggested. "Oh, I like doughnuts too," said Langbourne. "But you can't get the right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York." They began to talk about cooking.
Ewbert augured the best things for her husband's future usefulness from their presence. There was a full moon, and Langbourne walked about the town, unable to come into the hotel and go to bed.
Simpson operated a diversion by coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn, "Won't you take some lemonade?
Excuse interference on my part, but if you pour that petrol into the radiator, you will probably develop trouble." Johnny Everard laughed. "I am new to it, and I am always doing odd things like that. Of course, that's for water. Lawson over at Little Langbourne generally sees to things for me." Hugh nodded.
Barbara said nothing after a few faint attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham's satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been intending to go out with Mr.
"Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains," Langbourne returned. He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D. Bingham.
Miss Simpson has declined my offer," he answered. "Oh, then it's all right," said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as if he did not see why she should say that. "Then I can understand; I see the whole thing now; and I didn't want to make another mistake. Ah won't you sit down?" "Thank you. I believe I will go." "But you have a right to know "
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