"Maurice, I'm tired. I'll go home; you go on by yourself, and--and meet Johnny." She didn't know, herself, why she said it! Perhaps, it was just an effort to make up for what she had done in the morning?
Maurice, astonished, made some half-hearted protest; he would go back with her? But she said no, and walked home alone. Her throat ached with unshed tears. "He _likes_ to be with her! He doesn't want me,--and I love him--I love him!"
The two youngsters had made a long day of it. On their way to the brook that morning, crashing through underbrush, climbing rotting rail fences that were hidden in docks and briers, balancing on the precarious slipperiness of mossy rocks, the triumphant Johnny, his heart warm with gratitude to Eleanor, had led his captive and irritated Edith. When they broke through low-hanging boughs and found the pool, the trout possibilities of which Johnny had so earnestly "cracked up," Edith was distinctly grumpy. "Eleanor is a selfish thing," she said. "Gimme a worm."
"I think Maurice would have been cussedly selfish not to do what she wanted," Johnny said; "my idea of marriage is that a man must do everything his wife wants."
"Maurice is never selfish! He's great, simply great!" Edith said.
"Oh, he's decent enough," Johnny admitted, then he paused, frowning, for he couldn't open his bait box; he banged it on a stone, pried his knife under the lid, swore at it--and turned very red. Edith giggled.
But she took it, shook it, gave an easy twist, and the maddening lid--loosened, of course, by Johnny's exertions--came off! Edith shrieked with joy; but Johnny, though mortified, was immensely relieved. They sat down on a sloping rock, and talked bait, and the grave and spectacled Johnny became his old self, scolding Edith for talking so loudly. "Girls," he said, "are _born_ not fishermen!" Then they waded out into the stream, and began to cast. It was broad daylight by this time, and the woods were filling with netted sunbeams; the water whispered and chuckled.
"Pretty nice?" Johnny said, in a low voice; and Edith, all her grumpiness flown, said:
"You bet it is!" Then, as an afterthought, she called back, "But Eleanor is the limit!"
Johnny, forgetting his gratitude to Eleanor, said, savagely: "_Keep quiet!_ You scared him off! Gosh! girls are awful."