"What you said about them not being able to play the match without me. Besides," she concluded with a leap of thought which gave the words themselves a queer stamp of irrelevance, "he's going to play in it, too."

"Who is?" asked Louise blankly, brushing some strayed powder off her skirt.

"Leslie."

"Leslie? Well, I don't get the connection."

Hilda nodded quite violently. Her sleep-tossed[Pg 19] hair lay richly about her shoulders. One shoulder was bare, where the nightgown fell away from it. She was fresh and pretty. Perhaps not so pretty as Louise. But Hilda was only fifteen, just swinging into the earliest bloom of her womanhood.

[Pg 19]

"Yes," she explained, "Les is going to play in the match. He told me he would have to get back in time for that. So you see, if it's only the tennis you're thinking about, you might just as well let me go along as far as Beulah."

"Oh, he did?" asked her sister, rather sharply, it must be confessed, for one who had been so abstracted a moment before. "He said he'd have to get back?"

"Yes, Lou. Why? What's the matter?"

"Nothing." She thrust a pin into her hat.

Hilda regarded her sister's back a moment in silence—as though a back might somehow reveal, if one but looked hard enough, what new emotion was passing through a heart. But when she spoke it was casually, and without further adherence to the theme.

"My, Lou," she said, "you look grand this morning!"

"Ha! My street suit!"

"I know, but all our city clothes look grand up here in the woods."

"Well, I guess Lynndal wouldn't recognize me in a jumper. Remember, he hasn't seen me since last winter," observed Louise, with an evident seriousness of tone which might almost lead one to suspect she[Pg 20] really meant it was necessary to dress up in order to be recognized.

[Pg 20]

"Yes, but you've written every day," Hilda reminded her, renouncing the subject of clothes and skipping light-heartedly along the way of digression which had thus been opened up.

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