“I beg your pardon, but it is funny,” she sighed. “You see I came once just the same way, and now to have the tables turned like this! What will Aunt Hannah say—what will everybody say? Come, I want them to begin—to say it,” she chuckled irrepressibly.
“Thank you, but I shall go to a hotel, of course. Later, if you'll be so good as to let me call, and explain—!”
“But I'm afraid Aunt Hannah will think—” Billy stopped abruptly. Some distance away she saw John coming toward them. She turned hurriedly to the man at her side. Her eyes still danced, but her voice was mockingly serious. “Really, Mr. Mary Jane, I'm afraid you'll have to come to dinner; then you can settle the rest with Aunt Hannah. John is almost upon us—and I don't want to make explanations. Do you?”
“John,” she said airily to the somewhat dazed chauffeur (who had been told he was to meet a young woman), “take Mr. Arkwright's bag, please, and show him where Peggy is waiting. It will be five minutes, perhaps, before I can come—if you'll kindly excuse me,” she added to Arkwright, with a flashing glance from merry eyes. “I have some—telephoning to do.”
All the way to the telephone booth Billy was trying to bring order out of the chaos of her mind; but all the way, too, she was chuckling.
“To think that this thing should have happened to me!” she said, almost aloud. “And here I am telephoning just like Uncle William—Bertram said Uncle William did telephone about me!”
In due course Billy had Aunt Hannah at the other end of the wire.
“Aunt Hannah, listen. I'd never have believed it, but it's happened. Mary Jane is—a man.”
Billy heard a dismayed gasp and a muttered “Oh, my grief and conscience!” then a shaking “Wha-at?”
“I say, Mary Jane is a man.” Billy was enjoying herself hugely.
“A ma-an!”
“Yes; a great big man with a brown beard. He's waiting now with John and I must go.”
“But, Billy, I don't understand,” chattered an agitated voice over the line. “He—he called himself 'Mary Jane.' He hasn't any business to be a big man with a brown
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