The young man bent and softly touched her cheek with his lips.
She put out her hand and let it linger affectionately in his as he dropped into the chair beside her.
"I can't begin to tell you how glad I am to see you, Bob," she went on, in a voice soft and exquisitely modulated. "We had no idea you were on the Cape. But for that jeweler's stupidity we should have thought you had gone west long ago. Considering what good friends you and Roger are, you are the worst of correspondents; and you never write to me."
"I know it," owned Robert Morton with disarming honesty. "It's beastly of me."
"No, dear. On the contrary it is very like a man," contradicted Madam Lee with a pretty little laugh. "However, I am not going to scold you about it now. I have seen too many men in my day. First let me pour your tea. Then you shall tell me all that you have been doing. I hear you are visiting a new aunt whom you have just unearthed."
Bob chuckled at the characteristic directness of the question.
"That's nice. Since relatives are not of our choosing, it is pleasant to find they are not bores."
"And this old gentleman for whom she keeps house--what of him?"
It was plain Madam Lee had all the facts well in mind.
As best he could Bob sketched Willie in a few swift strokes.
"Humph! An interesting old fellow. I should like to see him," declared Madam Lee when the narrative was done. "And so you are working on this motor-boat with him?"
"And when do you go back to your family?"
"I don't quite know," hesitated the big fellow. "There is still a great deal to do on this invention we are working at."
"And the girl--where does she live?" she asked, reaching for Bob's cup.
"Of course there is a girl," went on the woman.
"Oh, Bob, Bob! Isn't there always a girl on every young man's horizon?"
"I suppose so--generally speaking," he confessed with a laugh.
"Suppose we abandon the abstract term and come down to this girl in particular," his interrogator said.
"Why are you so sure there is one?" he hedged teasingly.
"My dear boy, how absurd of you!" returned the sharp-eyed old lady with a twinkle of merriment. "In the first place, all the motor-boats in the world couldn't keep a young man like you chained up indefinitely in a sleepy little Cape Cod village. Besides, Cynthia told me."