Lizzie came in at this moment with a bowl of broth.  “I’ll hold it for you, Lydia,” said Billy.  “Never mind pulling the little table up, Lizzie, she’s too weak to fuss with a table.”

There was a remote twinkle in Lizzie’s old eyes, but she gave the bowl over to Billy, and tactfully withdrew to the kitchen, where she sat down with her feet in the oven.  “Drat Kent!” she said to herself.

Billy moved over to sit on the edge of the couch, and Lydia began to sip the broth, spoonful by spoonful.  “It’s such fun to be weak and a little helpless and have people waiting on you,” she said.  “It’s the first time it ever happened to me.”

As she spoke she was thinking how Billy had improved.  How immaculate he was and how well his blue suit fitted him.  There was no barnyard odor about him now!  Only a whiff of the good cigars he smoked.

“Billy,” she said, “what would you say if next year I took the short course in agriculture?”

Billy almost dropped the bowl.  “I’d be speechless!” he exclaimed.

“I hate to think of teaching,” Lydia went on, “and I’m crazy about the country and farming and so is Dad.  And there’s more than that to it.”

What more there was to it, she did not say then, for Ma Norton came bustling in.  She made no comment on Billy’s posing as a table!  Ma was wise and she was almost as devoted to Lydia as Billy himself.

“It’s nice to see the pink coming back in your cheeks, Lydia,” she said.  “I just ran over to say I was going into town to do some shopping, early in the morning, and if there was anything I could do for you—?”

“No, thank you,” said Lydia.  “I’ve begun to save up now to buy a cow!”

And Ma looked on with a puzzled smile as Lydia and Billy burst into sudden shrieks of laughter.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE END OF A GREAT SEARCH

“Abiding love!  Those humans who know it, become an essential part of nature’s scheme.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

Lydia returned to her college work the Monday after the Junior Prom, a little thinner, and her color not quite so bright as usual, but in a most cheerful frame of mind.  She was feeling, somehow, a new sense of maturity and contentment.  Even tales of the wonders of the Prom did not disturb her much.  She made up her lost classroom work, then took on an extra course in English Essayists with Professor Willis, just to satisfy her general sense of superiority to the ordinary temptations that should have disturbed a young female with fifteen idle dollars in her pocket!

Kent was devoting a good deal of attention to Lydia but this did not prevent his taking Margery about.  He was, he explained to Lydia, so sorry for her!

“You don’t have to explain to me,” protested Lydia.  “I want you to go with all the girls you like.  I intend to see all I want of as many men as care to see me.  I told you this was my playtime.”