"

"But after yesterday--and the way she acted when you played Chopin, and
what she said about our friendship, and all that--Was _anything_ genuine
at all?"

"Not a thing!" declared Phyllis, positively. "All put on to get a little
farther into our good graces. Well, I'll never be caught like _that_
again. We'll continue to seem very friendly to Miss Eileen Ramsay, but we
won't be caught twice!"

"By the way, what made you so late to-night?" questioned Leslie, suddenly
changing the subject. "I thought you'd never come!"

"Oh, I meant to tell you right away, but all this put it out of my head.
When I got home after the ride, I found only Father there. He said Ted
had been away most of the afternoon. He'd gone down to the village after
some new fishing-tackle and hadn't come back yet. I started in and got
supper, and still he didn't appear. Then we began to get worried and
'phoned down to Smithson's in the village where they sell tackle, to see
if he could be there. They said he _had_ been, early in the afternoon,
but they hadn't seen him since. We called up every other place he could
possibly be, but nowhere was he to be found. I was beginning to be quite
upset about him--when in he walked!

"He was very quiet and uncommunicative and wouldn't explain why he was so
late. And then, presently, he said in a very casual manner that his hand
was hurt. And when he showed it to us, I almost screamed, for it was very
badly hurt--all torn and lacerated. He had it wrapped in his
handkerchief, but we made him undo it, and I bathed it and Father put
iodine on, and I fixed him a sling to wear it in. The thing about it was
that he didn't seem to want to tell us how it happened. Said he met a
friend who invited him to ride in their car and had taken him for a long
drive. And on the way home they'd had a little breakdown, and Ted had
tried to help fix it and had got his hand caught in the machinery
somehow.

"But he was plainly very anxious not to be questioned about it. And
Father says that Ted is old enough now to be trusted, and should not be
compelled to speak when he doesn't wish to, and so nothing more was said.
But it all seemed a little strange to me, for, honestly, I don't know a
single soul in this village that Ted knows who owns a car, or any other
of our friends who would be likely to be around these parts just now.
They're all home at their schools or colleges. When I asked him whose car
he was in, he just glared at me