“Oh, but I am engaged,” she answered, reverting to her original fiction. “My fiancé is on duty and can’t get away. As soon as he comes over we’re to be married. Now, please, do you think it’s _very_ awful? You’ve been so good, I should hate to have you despise me.”
“Oh, I’m no sort of a despiser,” he assured her. “And if I felt like doing a bit of despising, I’d go out in the woods and despise a toad. Certainly I shouldn’t try my hand on anything as plucky and resourceful as you.”
“Resourcefulness is good as far as it goes,” said she. “But could I carry the thing through if my friends come back here and I have to present you?”
“I shouldn’t concern myself about that,” he comforted her. “Surely they won’t come.”
“Bridal touring couples don’t commonly go about seeking other companionship, do they?” Darcy stared. “How do you know they are on their bridal trip? I never told you.”
“Surmised it from something my friend, Mr. Thomas Harmon told me.”
“Boulder Brook, he calls it. It’s up on the edge of the mountains.”
The girl leaned back, closed her eyes, and began to count slowly: “One—two—three—four—”
“I say,” broke in the partner of her plot. “Let a chap in on this. What’s wrong?”
“You said it just now: ‘These things do _not_ happen to people.’ You were right. They don’t. Anyhow, they ought not to be allowed to. Five—six—seven—Oh, there’s no use counting ten on this.” She opened her great, gray-blue eyes wide upon him. “So’m I,” she announced.
Barely in time did he check the natural rejoinder, “So are your friends, the bridal couples,” for he bethought himself that, if she knew, she would doubtless escape from the train at the first station and this astounding and priceless adventure would be abruptly terminated. Instead he said:
“May I take you over with me? I’m having a car at Laconia.”
“Mr. Harmon is having me met at Weirs. Weirs is miles nearer.”
“Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift with you. I’m for the Bungalow, wherever that is.”
“And I’m for the Farmhouse, and the chaperonage of Mrs. Bond. So it isn’t as terribly compromising as it sounds, is it? Though what in the world Mr. Harmon would think, if this ever got to his ears—”
“It won’t. In any case, Harmon is not a thinker of evil.”