Just Patty Part 27

"Another penny!"

Patty peered into an empty pocket.

"You'll have to charge it. I've used up all my ready money."

The spring sun was warm, the fountain was splas.h.i.+ng, the wind was sprinkling the pavilion floor with white magnolia petals. Patty helped herself to marmalade with a happy sigh of contentment.

"The most fun in the world is to run away from the things you ought to do," she p.r.o.nounced.

He acknowledged this immoral truth with a laugh.

"I suppose you ought to be working?" she asked.

"There are one or two little matters that might be the better for my attention."

"And aren't you glad you're not doing them?"

"Bully glad!"

She held out her hand.

"Give it back."

The cent returned to her pocket, and the meal progressed gaily. Patty was in an elated frame of mind, and Patty's elation was catching.

Escaping from bounds, trespa.s.sing on a private estate, planting onions, and picnicking in the Italian garden with the head gardener--she had never had such a dizzying whirl of adventures. The head gardener also seemed to enjoy the sensation of offering sanctuary to a runaway school girl. Their appreciation of the lark was mutual.

As Patty, with painstaking honesty, was dividing the last of the gingerbread into two exact halves, she was startled by the sound of a footstep on the gravel path behind; and there walked into their party a groom--a crimson-faced, gaping young man who stood mechanically bobbing his head. Patty stared back a touch apprehensively. She hoped that she hadn't got her friend into trouble. It was very possibly against the rules for gardeners to entertain runaway school girls in the Italian garden. The groom continued to stare and to duck his head, and her companion rose and faced him.

"Well?" he inquired with a note of sharpness. "What do you want?"

"Beg pardon, sir, but this telegram come, and Richard says it might be important, sir, and he says for me to find you, sir."

He received the telegram, ran his eyes over it, scribbled an answer on the back with a gold pencil which he extracted from his pocket, and dismissed the man with a curt nod. The envelope had fluttered to the table and lay there face up. Patty inadvertently glanced at the address, and as the truth flashed across her, she hid her head against the back of the stone seat in a gale of laughter. Her companion looked momentarily sheepish, then he too laughed.

"You have enjoyed the privilege of telling me exactly how rude you think I am. Not even the reporters always allow themselves that pleasure."

"Oh, but that was before I knew you! I think now that you have perfectly beautiful manners."

He bowed his thanks.

"I shall endeavor to have better in the future. It will be my pleasure to put my greenhouses at the disposal of the young ladies of St.

Ursula's some afternoon soon."

"Really?" she smiled. "That's awfully nice of you!"

They repacked the hamper and divided the crumbs among the goldfish in the fountain.

"And now," he inquired, "which will you visit first--the picture gallery or the orchids?"

Patty emerged from the orchid house at four o'clock, her arms filled with an unprecedented collection for Conny's book. The big yellow four-in-hand coach was standing outside the stable being washed. She examined it interestedly.

"Should you like to have me drive you home on that?"

"Oh, I'd love it!" Patty dimpled. "But I'm afraid it wouldn't be wise,"

she added on second thought. "No, I am sure it wouldn't be wise," she firmly turned her back. Her eyes fell on the road, and an apprehensive light sprang to her face.

"There's the hea.r.s.e!"

"The hea.r.s.e?"

"Yes, the school wagonette. I think I'd better be going."

He accompanied her back, through the vegetable garden and the enchanted wood, and held her flowers while she crawled under the fence, tearing a hole in the other shoulder of her blouse.

They shook hands through the barbed wire.

"I've enjoyed both the onions and the orchids," said Patty politely, "and particularly the gingerbread. And if I ever have any convict friends in need of employment, I may send them to you?"

"Do so," he urged. "I will find them a job here."

She started off, then turned to wave good-by to him.

"I've had a perfectly bully time!"

"A penny!" he called.

Patty laughed and ran.

XI

The Lemon Pie and the Monkey-Wrench

Evalina Smith was a morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amus.e.m.e.nt was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the actual experience of people she knew. She had even had one or two spiritual adventures herself; and she would set forth the details with wide eyes and lowered voice, while her auditors held one another's hands and s.h.i.+vered. The circle in which Evalina moved had not much sense of humor.

One Sat.u.r.day evening St. Ursula's School was in an unusually social mood. Evalina was holding a ghost party in her room in the East Wing; Nancy Lee had invited her ten dearest friends to a birthday spread in Center; the European History cla.s.s was celebrating the completion of the Thirty-Years War by a mola.s.ses-candy pull in the kitchen; and Kid McCoy was conducting a potato race down the length of the South Corridor--the entrance fee a postage stamp, the prize sealed up in a large bandbox and warranted to be worth a quarter.

Patty, who was popular, had been invited to all four of the functions.

She had declined Nancy's spread, because Mae Van Arsdale, her particular enemy, was invited; but had accepted the other invitations, and was busily spending the evening as an itinerant guest.

She carried her potato, insecurely balanced on a teaspoon, over one table and under another, through a hoop suspended from the ceiling, and deposited it in the wastebasket at the end of the corridor, in exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds. (Kid McCoy had a stop-watch.) This was far ahead of anyone else's record, and Patty lingered hopefully a few minutes in the neighborhood of the bandbox; but a fresh inrush of entries postponed the bestowal of the prize, so she left the judges to settle the question at their leisure, and drifted on to Evalina's room.

She found it dark, except for the fitful blue flare of alcohol and salt burning in a fudge pan. The guests were squatting about on sofa cus.h.i.+ons, looking decidedly spotty in the unbecoming light. Patty silently dropped down on a vacant cus.h.i.+on, and lent polite attention to Evalina, who at the moment held the floor.

"Well, you know, I had a very remarkable experience myself last summer.

Happening to visit a spiritualist camp, I attended a materializing seance."