Toward the last of June Neville left town to spend a month with his father and mother at their summer Lome near Portsmouth.

Valerie had already gone to the mountains with Rita Tevis, gaily refusing her address to everybody.

And, packing their steamer trunks and satchels, the two young girls departed triumphantly for the unindicated but modest boarding-house tucked away somewhere amid the hills of Delaware County, determined to enjoy every minute of a vacation well earned, and a surcease from the round of urban and suburban gaiety which the advent of July made a labour instead of a relaxation.
From some caprice or other Valerie had decided that her whereabouts should remain unknown even to Neville.

And for a week it suited her perfectly.

She swam in the stump-pond with Rita, drove a buckboard with Rita, fished industriously with Rita, played tennis on a rutty court, danced rural dances at a "platform," went to church and giggled like a schoolgirl, and rocked madly on the veranda in a rickety rocking-chair, demurely tolerant of the adoration of two boys working their way through, college, a smartly dressed and very confident drummer doing his two weeks, and several assorted and ardent young men who, at odd moments, had persuaded her to straw rides and soda at the village druggists.
[Illustration: "A smartly dressed and very confident drummer."] And all the while she giggled with Rita in a most shameless and undignified fashion, went about hatless, with hair blowing and sleeves rolled up; decorated a donation party at the local minister's and flirted with him till his gold-rimmed eye-glasses protruded; behaved like a thoughtful and considerate angel to the old, uninteresting and infirm; romped like a young goddess with the adoring children of the boarders, and was fiercely detested by the crocheting spinsters rocking in acidulated rows on the piazza.
The table was meagre and awful and pruneful; but she ate with an appetite that amazed Rita, whose sophisticated palate was grossly insulted thrice daily.
"How on earth you can contrive to eat that hash," she said, resentfully, "I don't understand.