Little else was discussed all during dinner. Afterward they sat around the fire in the drawing-room, still talking of the Wares and the strange country to which they had moved, until a tooting of horns and a jingling of bells announced the coming of the sleighing party. Both the girls were into their wraps before the first sleigh reached the gate. They stood waiting by the hall window, looking out on the stretches of moon-lighted snow. What a cold, white, glistening world it was! One could hardly imagine that it had ever been warm and green.
Lloyd put her nose into the end of her muff for a whiff of the orange blossoms. She was taking Joyce's letter to show to the girls.
Betty, her eyes fixed on the stars, twinkling above the bare branches of the locust-trees, caught the fragrance also, and it fired her romantic little soul with a sudden thought.
"Lloyd," she exclaimed, "what if that orange blossom was an omen! What if Phil were the one written for you in the stars!"
"Oh, Betty! The idea!" laughed Lloyd. "You're always imagining things the way they are in books."
"But this happened just that way," persisted Betty. "His passing Locust on the train and seeing you when you were a little girl, and then finding your picture away out on the desert several years after, and sending you a token of his remembrance by a friend, and orange blossoms at that! If ever I finish that story of Gladys and Eugene, I'm going to put something like that in it."
"Heah they come," interrupted Lloyd, as the sleighs dashed up to the door. "Come on, Papa Jack and everybody. Give us a good send-off."
She looked back after her father had helped them into the sleigh, to wave good-bye to the group on the porch. How interested they all were in her good times, she thought. Even her grandfather had come to the door, despite his rheumatism, to wish them a pleasant ride. Life was so sweet and full. How beautiful it was to be dashing down the snowy road in the moonlight! Was she too happy? Everybody else had troubles. Would something dreadful have to happen by and by, to make up for all the unclouded happiness of the present? She was not cold, but a sudden shiver passed over her. Then she took up the song with the others, a parody one of the Seminary girls had made for the occasion: