A Fool There Was | Page 8

of eighteen, means vast changes; and when
that year has been spent at boarding school, it means changes yet more
vast, infinitely. Thus, it was that Jack Schuyler and Tom Blake stood,
jaws agape, eyes wide-open, and stared--frankly, unequivocally
stared.... Then they went to meet her; and both tried to shake hands at
once; then both tried to pick up her travelling case at once; and they
bumped their heads.
For the first half mile of the drive to the shore, they sat dumb, thinking
with sore strainings of mind for things to say, and rejecting each
because it didn't seem to be good enough. Finally Tom Blake ventured
a remark anent the weather. No harm came to him. So Jack Schuyler

ventured one about the wind. He also went scatheless.
At length Tom Blake, looking at the fresh, clean beauty of the girl on
the other seat, forgot himself, and voiced, in the moment of his
temporary aberration, that which was in the two adolescent male minds.
"Doggone, but you've grown pretty, Kate!" and then blushed.
She blushed, too, and looked at Jack Schuyler. At which he blushed
and almost carromed the trap against a telegraph pole. Whereat they all
laughed. And from then on, they were themselves.
They were met by her mother at "The Lawns," and by Dr. DeLancey.
Dr. DeLancey was not bashful. He pinched her glowing cheek and
looked her over, critically.
"A positive symposium of pulchritude," he declared. "I wish I were
fifty or seventy-five years younger, by Jove! If you two boys let any
rank outsider take her out of the family, you'll have me to reckon with.
Yes, by Jove, you will! And you'll find that while I may be a poor
fencer, and a worse boxer, I'm still a good spanker!"

[Illustration]
CHAPTER SIX.
AN ACCIDENT.
Dr. DeLancey, sitting under the awning of the after deck of "The
Idlesse," and gazing out upon the sound where Jack Schuyler, Tom
Blake and Kathryn Blair were defying the laws of nature in a thirty foot
knockabout, much to the unspoken anxiety of two fathers and the
spoken fear of three mothers, again voiced this thought on the
following evening.
"The prettiest, sweetest, finest, loveliest child I ever knew, by Jove," he
declared; then, bowing, "present company, of course, excepted.... Yes,

sir. If you two old ninnies don't force your sons to marry her, I'll take it
into my own hands, damme if I don't, by Jove!"
"But they can't both marry her," protested the widow of Jimmy Blair,
placing her arm about the baby brother that had turned out to be a
sister.
The Doctor waved his hand, loftily.
"A mere detail," he asserted. "As long as one of 'em marries her, that
fixes it, doesn't it? And it doesn't make any difference which one;
they're equally fine boys, both of 'em. Look at 'em. Did you ever see
better shoulders--better shaped heads--better carriages? Mighty dashed
handsome boys, too, they are--get it from their mothers," he bowed
elaborately to Mrs. Jon Stuyvesant Schuyler and to Mrs. Thomas
Cathcart Blake, then added a look of contempt for, and at their
husbands. "Yes, sir," he went on, "they're fine boys, two of 'em--no
denying that. And she--she's the right sort--no frills, or airs, or bluffs.
Sensible, natural. If I'd have had a few more patients like them, I'd have
starved to death long ago. Why, they didn't have even a single
measle--not one whooping cough out of the lot. Disgraceful!"
In the meanwhile, far out on the sound, the little knockabout was
heeling far over in the playful breath of the summer breeze. Tom Blake,
bare- headed, bare-armed, was at the tiller. Jack Schuyler, also
bare-headed and bare-armed, sat on the after overhang, tending the
sheet, and bracing muscular legs against the swirling seas that, leaping
over the low freeboard, tried to swirl him off among them. Kathryn
Blair, leaned lithely against the weather rail, little, white--canvas-shod
feet braced, skirts whipping about her slender body, rounded arms
gripping the wet edge of the cockpit rail. The gold-brown hair, in
loosened strands, whipped across her tanned cheek; her gown, open at
the throat, revealed a glimpse of straight, perfectly-poised throat; her
lips were parted and her breath came fast in the excitement of it.
Blake held the knockabout to its course, with the confidence of youth
in his prowess, against them. The little boat leaped forward from crest
to crest, stopping between to shake the water from its deck. Above was

the blue sky--all about them the blue water, white crested.
The girl, bracing herself against a particularly hard pitch of the boat,
balancing herself lightly, as the craft recovered and again leaped
forward, cried:
"Isn't this fine!"
Blake nodded. Schuyler, waist deep in a swooping sea, did