But Bob wasn't going to dangle much longer. He hadn't a doubt but that everything was all right and he was in haste to taste the assurance.
These hesitations of hers would convey nothing to his youthful masculinity but that she didn't care enough. And his was not the age that appreciates the temporizing half loaf.
So that trip up the mountain meant for them much youthful discussion, much searching of wills and hearts and motives, a threatening gloom upon his part, and a struggling defensiveness upon hers.
Small wonder that Maria Angelina and her companion were not remembered!
It was not until she was at the very top of old Baldy, and again a part of the general group that Ruth had the thought to look about her and recognize her cousin's absence.
"They _are_ taking their time," she remarked to Bob.
"Glad they're enjoying it," he gave back with a disgruntled air that Ruth determinedly ignored.
"I guess Ri-Ri's no good at a climb," she said. "This little old mountain must have got her."
"Oh, Johnny's strong right arm will do the work," he returned indifferently.
"But they ought to be here now. You don't suppose they missed the way?" Mrs. Blair, overhearing, suggested, and turned to look down the steep path that they had come.
"Johnny knows his way about. They'll be along when they feel like it," he predicted easily, and Mrs. Blair turned to the arrangement of supper with a slight anxiety which she dissembled beneath casual cheerfulness.
In her heart she was vexed. Dreadfully noticeable, she thought, that persistent lagging of theirs. She might have expected it of Johnny Byrd--he had a way of making new girls conspicuous--but she had looked for better things from Maria Angelina.
It was too bad. It showed that as soon as you gave those cloistered girls an inch they took an ell.
Outwardly she spoke with praise of her charge. Julia Martin, a youthful aunt of Bob's, was curious about the girl.
"She's the loveliest creature," she declared with facile enthusiasm, as she and Mrs. Blair delved into a hamper that the Martins' chauffeur and butler had shouldered up before the picnickers.
"And so naïvely young--I don't see how her mother dared let her come so far away."
"Oh--her mother wanted her to see America," Mrs. Blair gave back.