“It was too lovely for anything,” sighed Libbie.

“I’m glad you think so,” said Betty.  “Oh! you mean what Bob did.  I see.  Of course he is lovely—­always has been.  But don’t tell him so, for it utterly spoils boys if you praise them—­doesn’t it Bobby?”

“Of course it does,” agreed Betty’s particular chum, whose real name, Roberta, was seldom used even by her parents.

“I like that!” chorused the Tucker twins.  “Wait till we tell Bob, Betty,” added Tommy Tucker, shaking his head.

“If you try to slide downhill on horseback again, we’ll all just let you slide to the very bottom,” said Teddy.

“Don’t fret,” returned Betty gaily.  “I don’t intend to take another such slide——­”

“Not even if your Uncle Dick takes you up to Mountain Camp?” asked Bobby.  “There’s fine tobogganing up there, he says.  Mmmm!”

“Don’t talk about it!” wailed Betty.  “You know we can’t go, for school begins next week and Uncle Dick won’t hear to anything breaking in on my schooling.”

“Not even measles?” suggested Tommy Tucker solemnly.  “Two of the fellows were quarantined with it when we left Salsette,” he added.

“Oh! don’t speak of such a horrid thing,” gasped Libbie, who did not consider measles in the least romantic.  “You get all speckled like—­like a zebra if you have ’em.”

The twins uttered a concerted shout and almost rolled out of their saddles into which they had again mounted after assisting the girls, Betty being astride Bob’s horse.

“Speckled like a zebra is good!” Bobby Littell said laughingly to her plump cousin.  “I suppose you think a barber’s pole is speckled, Libbie?”

These observations attracted the deluded Libbie sufficiently from her hero-worship, so that when Bob Henderson came up out of the ravine to join them a mile beyond the scene of the accident, he was perfectly safe from Libbie’s romantic consideration.

The boy and girl friends were then in a deep discussion of the chances, pro and con, of Betty’s Uncle Dick taking her with him to Mountain Camp despite the imminent opening of the term at Shadyside.

“Of course there is scarcely a possibility of his doing so,” Betty said finally with hopeless mien.  “Mr. Canary—­Uncle Dick’s friend is named Jonathan Canary, isn’t that a funny name?” she interrupted herself to ask.

“He’s a bird,” declared Teddy Tucker solemnly.

“Nothing romantic sounding about that name,” his brother said, with a look at Libbie. “’Jonathan Canary’—­no poetry in that.”

“He, he!” chuckled Ted wickedly.  “Talking about poetry——­”

“But we weren’t!” said Bobby Littell.  “We were talking about going to Mountain Camp in the Adirondacks.  Think of it—­in the dead of winter!”

“Talking about poetry,” steadily pursued Teddy Tucker.  “You know Timothy Derby is always gushing.”

“A ‘gusher,’” interposed Betty primly, “is an oil well that comes in with a bang.”