The tears were falling so rapidly now on Katharine’s cheeks that she could no longer keep from being generally observed. She sprang up, and with her handkerchief to her eyes groped her way from the room, and they heard her a moment later stumbling up the stairs.
Jim looked in bewilderment to the door through which she had gone and then back to the stricken Peggy with an expression of “What have I done?” for he thought surely the girls must have given some impression of him to their principal for a reason of their own and now he had ruthlessly destroyed the fabric of their tale.
Mrs. Forest herself looked vague and uncomfortable, and after a few banal remarks, excused herself on the ground that some of the teachers were expected for tea and she must be in her room to receive them. After she had swished out Peggy drew a long breath.
“Then you aren’t—?” she questioned heartbrokenly, “then you aren’t, at all?”
“Let me into the secret,” pleaded the miserable boy. “I always knew girls were mysterious persons, and that they lived in all sorts of unreal adventures. Am I scheduled to pass for an incognito villain of some sort—or—or prince—or anything? Because I tell you frankly, I ought to have been coached for my part beforehand if that’s the case. I can’t be expected to know all these things by intuition. Now I’ve made that pretty Katherine cry, and I angered you, and disgusted Mrs. Forest and yet, cross my heart, and as I live, I’ve been behaving just as nicely as I know how. Please, Peggy, clear up the mystery. I’ve been working so hard at trig just before exams that I’m in no state to go on solving problems.”
“You see,” said Peggy, her mouth going into a smile, and the absurdity of it all beginning to send a sparkle of fun to her eyes, “it isn’t your fault. We thought you were the missing grandson of our friend Mr. Huntington, and we’ve been Sherlocking since last Thanksgiving day to find him. So when you tallied up with what the fortune teller told us—”
“Fortune teller—Oh, I see!” laughed the young man.
“And then, when your middle initial proved to be H.—why, of course, we thought that stood for Huntington, and I’m disappointed to death that it doesn’t. By the way, what does it stand for?” she asked curiously, pausing abruptly in her explanation.
She could not have been prepared for the curious expression that came into Jim’s face at this point. His head drooped and three distinct series of flushes and palings swept his good-looking countenance.
“I don’t—know,” he said after a time, in a low voice.