ng meal that
Sylvia saw, threading his way towards them between the other tables, a
tall, weedy, expensively dressed young man, with a pale freckled face
and light-brown hair. When he saw her eyes on him he waved his hand,
a largely knuckled hand, and grinned. Then she saw that it was not a
young man, but a tall boy, and that the boy was Arnold. The quality of
the grin reminded her that she had always liked Arnold.

His arrival, though obviously unexpected to the last degree, caused
less of a commotion than might have seemed natural. It was as if
this were for Aunt Victoria only an unexpected incident in a general
development, quite resignedly anticipated. After he had shaken hands
with everybody, and had sat down and ordered his own luncheon very
capably, his stepmother remarked in a tolerant tone, "You didn't get
my telegram, then?" He shook his head: "I started an hour or so after
I wired you. We'd gone down to the town with one of the masters for a
game with Concord. There was a train just pulling out as we went by
the station, and I ran and jumped on."

"How'd you know where it was going?" challenged Judith.

"I didn't," he explained lightly. He looked at her with the teasing,
provocative look of masculine seventeen for feminine thirteen. "Same
old spitfire, I see, Miss Judy," he said, his command of unhackneyed
phrases by no means commensurate with his desire to be facetious.

Judith frowned and went on eating her eclair in silence. It was the
first eclair she had ever eaten, and she was more concerned with it
than with the new arrival.

Nobody made any comment on Arnold's method of beginning journeys until
Mrs. Marshall asked, "What did you do it for?" She put the question
with an evident seriousness of inquiry, not at all with the rhetorical
reproach usually conveyed in the formula she used.

Arnold looked up from the huge, costly, bloody beefsteak he was eating
and, after an instant's survey of the grave, kind, face opposite him,
answered with a seriousness like her own, "Because I wanted to get
away." He added after a moment, laughing and looking again at the
younger girl, "I wanted to come out and pull Judy's hair again!" He
spoke with his mouth full, and this made him entirely a boy and not at
all the young man his well-cut clothes made him appear.

Without speaking, Judith pulled her long, smooth braid around over her
shoulder where she could protect the end of it. Her mouth was also
full, bulgingly