Then she sobered suddenly, as you do at a funeral after you have forgotten where you are and then remember. That card was an unpleasant thing to take home!... Just what did Raymond mean by giving Kitty Allen a lock of his hair? And doing it before Missy herself--“Kitty, here's that lock I promised you”--just like that. Then he had laughed and joked as if nothing unusual had happened--only was he watching her out of the corner of his eye when he thought she wasn't looking? That was the real question. The idea of Raymond trying to make her jealous! How simple-minded boys are!
But, after all, what a dear, true friend he had proved himself in the past--before she offended him. And how much more is friendship than mere pleasures like travel--like going to Colorado.
But was he jealous? If he was--Missy felt an inexplicable kind of bubbling in her heart at that idea. But if he wasn't--well, of course it was natural she should wonder whether Raymond looked on friendship as a light, come-and-go thing, and on locks of hair as meaning nothing at all. For he had never been intimate with Kitty Allen; and he had said he didn't like curly hair. Yet, probably, he had one of Kitty Allen's ringlets... Missy felt a new, hideous weight pulling down her heart.
Of course she had given that straight wisp to Don Jones--but what else could she do to keep him from telling? Oh, life is a muddle! And here, in less than a week, Aunt Isabel would come by and whisk her off to the ends of the earth; and she might have to go without really knowing what Raymond meant...
And oh, yes--that old card! How dreary life can be as one grows older.
Missy waited to show the card till her father came home to supper--she knew it was terribly hard for father to be stern. But when Missy, all mute appeal, extended him the report, he looked it over in silence and then passed it on to mother. Mother, too, examined it with maddening care.
“Well,” she commented at last. “I see you've failed again.”
“It was all the fault of those two weeks' grades,” the culprit tried to explain. “If it hadn't been for that--”
“But there was 'that.'” Mother's tone was terribly unsympathetic.
“No, that's the trouble. I've warned you, Missy. You've got to learn to think. You'll have to stay home and make up those grades this summer. You'd better write to Aunt Isabel at once, so she won't be inconvenienced.”