“Yes,” she repeated; and then, with a yet more puzzled air, she turned to Mr. Lane to ask, “Is this mind-reading?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” returned he. “Mr. Gray can best tell what it is.”
“And the rest of the way to Boston,” I continued, ignoring the interruption, “you were elaborating your story. You took the heroine’s name from the same line, and had a pun at the climax about the hero’s becoming ‘lord of May.’”
“No,” Miss Graham retorted, beginning to enter into the spirit of the situation. “I deny the pun, although I acknowledge the rest. The pun I didn’t even think of.”
“Well, you see I haven’t read your manuscript, but I own I fell so low that I put in the pun myself. At least the old gentleman with a scar on his cheek, who sat in the corner of the car, gave you hints for—”
“The uncle,” broke in Miss Graham, with a gleeful laugh at the remembrance of the oddity of the old gentleman’s appearance. “But how in the world did you know?”
“Oh, he did me. We evidently had the same mental experience; which proves, I suppose, that we are literary Corsican brothers or something of the sort.”
“But the great question to be settled is,” Mr. Lane observed, bringing in, after some further talk, the editorial consideration, “whose story this really is.”
“Miss Graham’s, by all means,” I said instantly. “Hers was first in the field, and if I hadn’t impertinently looked over her shoulder, I shouldn’t have had any share in it whatever.”