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"Do you see him?"
The other seventeen-year-old girl adjusted her binoculars, then lit up. "Yes! There he is!"
The two young women lay on their bellies on the hill, looking at the tall thin figure in white moving among the white boxes of beehives dotting the grassy downs near the neat little cottage.
The black-haired girl lowered the binoculars. "That's really Sherlock Holmes, Betsy?" The girl's violet eyes gleamed.
"Very much so, Alice," Betsy replied. "He's been out here for almost four years now."
"All by himself in that lonely cottage, the poor man." The look on Alice's face was not commiseration as much as it was calculation.
Betsy shrugged. "He has a housekeeper once a week. And his old friend Dr. Watson is there a lot, too."
"But not a real companion," insisted Alice. "Not someone who's young, and smart for her age, and pretty, and different from all the other girls, and dresses in a charmingly tomboyish fashion in keeping with this new century, and thinks consulting detectives are just so dishy, and thinks that beekeeping is such an interesting pursuit, and who'd be an even better colleague for him than some fat stupid old doctor."
Betsy side-eyed Alice. "Not someone who just found out exactly how wealthy that old man is."
"Betsy, that's terrible of you!" Alice snapped – but the icy glint in her eyes showed that that remark had hit just a little close to home.
"I'm sorry, Alice, I shouldn't have said such a cruel thing. Especially to a visiting school chum." Betsy looked back at the cottage and the white figure, moving closer to them as he approached another beehive box. She smiled. "And…well? These days it's not so odd for older men to pair up with younger women. They say a man's furnace never really goes out."
"Then let's go up and introduce ourselves!" Alice said. "He's such an old Victorian he'll probably get the shock of his life to see girls being so forward!" She giggled. "I'll bet he'll be secretly charmed and flattered. That's a start, isn't it?"
"I'd rather not bother him right now," Betsy said. "He's busy as his own bees."
"Oh who cares about a bunch of old bees anyway?" Alice snapped, momentarily forgetting just how interesting she considered beekeeping to be when wealthy old men practiced it, and scrambled to her feet. "Betsy, you're an older woman than his housekeeper! I'm going."
Betsy took her time getting to her feet as Alice headed confidently down the hill and approached the old veiled man. She brushed the grass off her bicycle shorts and collected their sandwich papers.
Betsy was halfway back to where they'd left their bicycles when she heard Alice's high-pitched wail of terror, growing louder as it came nearer. And Alice raced past Betsy in a line away from both the cottage and their grassy hill, her cries almost drowned out by the baying of half a dozen lurcher-spaniel hybrids racing after the intruder.
Betsy risked a peek over the mound of the hill once again. Now there were two figures among the beehives, the tall man in white, and a shorter stouter old man in grey. Which the tall man greeted with a cheek-kiss.
"All the time" was the same thing as "a lot," wasn't it? And they didn't like intruders, especially not romantic ones.
Betsy left Alice's bicycle where it lay so she could find it after her merry chase, and mounted her own vehicle. She glared after the vanishing school chum.
"Borrow MY best blouse and get an ink-stain on it, will you?"