Just Patty. Jean Webster

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СКАЧАТЬ roses in vivid profusion. A message in the same back hand accompanied each gift, signed sometimes with initials, and sometimes with a simple "Bertie." Parcels had never before been delivered with such unsuspicious promptitude. Miss Sallie was the one through whose hands they went. She glanced at the outside, scrawled a "deliver," and the maid would choose the most embarrassing moments to comply—always when Mae Mertelle was surrounded by an audience.

      Mae's Englishman, from an object of sentiment, in a few days' time became the joke of the school. His taste in literature was as impossible as his taste in candy. He ran to titles which are supposed to be the special prerogative of the kitchen. "Loved and Lost," "A Born Coquette," "Thorns among the Orange Blossoms." Poor Mae repudiated them, but to no avail; the school had accepted Cuthbert—and was bent upon eliciting all the entertainment possible from his British vagaries. Mae's life became one long dread of seeing the maid appear with a parcel. The last straw was the arrival of a complete edition—in paper—of Marie Corelli.

      "He—he never sent them!" she sobbed. "Somebody's just trying to be funny."

      "You mustn't mind, Mae, because they aren't just the sort that an American man would choose," Patty offered comfort. "You know that Englishmen have queer tastes, particularly in books. Everybody reads Marie Corelli over there."

      The next Saturday, a party of girls was taken to the city for shopping and the matinée. Among other errands, the art class visited a photograph dealer's, to purchase some early Italian masters. Patty's interest in Giotto and his kind was not very keen, and she sauntered off on a tour of inspection. She happened upon a pile of actors and actresses, and her eye brightened as she singled out a large photograph of an unfamiliar leading man, with curling mustache and dimpled chin and large appealing eyes. He was dressed in hunting costume and conspicuously displayed a crop. The picture was the last word in Twentieth Century Romance. And, most perfect touch of all, it bore a London mark!

      Patty unobtrusively deflected the rest of the committee from a consideration of Fra Angelico, and the three heads bent delightedly over the find.

      "It's perfect!" Conny sighed. "But it costs a dollar and fifty cents."

      "We'll have to go without soda water forever!" said Priscilla.

      "It is expensive," Patty agreed, "but—" as she restudied the liquid, appealing eyes—"I really think it's worth it."

      They each contributed fifty cents, and the picture was theirs.

      Patty wrote across the front, in the bold back hand that Mae had come to hate, a tender message in French, and signed the full name, "Cuthbert St. John." She had it wrapped in a plain envelope and requested the somewhat wondering clerk to mail it the following Wednesday morning, as it was an anniversary present and must not arrive before the day.

      The picture came on the five-o'clock delivery, and was handed to Mae as the girls trooped out from afternoon study. She received it in sulky silence and retired to her room. Half a dozen of her dearest friends followed at her heels; Mae had worked hard to gain a following, and now it couldn't be shaken off.

      "Open it, Mae quick!"

      "What do you s'pose it is?"

      "It can't be flowers or candy. He must be starting something new."

      "I don't care what it is!" Mae viciously tossed the parcel into the wastebasket.

      Irene McCullough fished it out and cut the string.

      "Oh, Mae, it's his photograph!" she squealed. "And he's per-fect-ly beau-ti-ful!"

      "Did you ever see such eyes!"

      "Does he curl his mustache, or it is natural?"

      "Why didn't you tell us he had a dimple in his chin?"

      "Does he always wear those clothes?"

      Mae was divided between curiosity and anger. She snatched the photograph away, cast one glance at the languishing brown eyes, and tumbled it, face downward, into a bureau drawer.

      "Don't ever mention his name to me again!" she commanded, as, with compressed lips, she commenced brushing her hair for dinner.

      On the next Friday afternoon—shopping day in the village—Patty and Conny and Priscilla dropped in at the florist's to pay a bill.

      "Two bunches of sunflowers, one dollar," the man had just announced in ringing tones from the rear of the store, when a step sounded behind them, and they faced about to find Mae Mertelle Van Arsdale, bent on a similar errand.

      "Oh!" said Mae, fiercely, "I might have known it was you three."

      She stared for a moment in silence, then she dropped into a rustic seat and buried her head on the counter. She had shed so many tears of late that they flowed automatically.

      "I suppose," she sobbed, "you'll tell the whole school, and everybody will laugh and—and—"

      The three regarded her with unbending mien. They were not to be moved by a few tears.

      "You said that Rosalie was a silly little goose to make such a fuss over nothing," Priscilla reminded her.

      "And at least he was a live man," said Patty, "even if he did have a crooked nose."

      "Do you still think she was a silly goose?" Conny inquired.

      "N—no!"

      "Don't you think you've been a great deal more silly?"

      "Y—yes."

      "And will you apologize to Rosalie?"

      "No!"

      "It will make quite a funny story," Patty ruminated, "the way we'll tell it."

      "I think you're perfectly horrid!"

      "Will you apologize to Rosalie?" Priscilla asked again.

      "Yes—if you'll promise not to tell."

      "We'll promise on one condition—you're to break your engagement to Cuthbert St. John, and never refer to it again."

      Cuthbert sailed for England on the Oceanic the following Thursday; St. Ursula's plunged into a fever of basket-ball, and the atmosphere became bracingly free of Romance.

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