"This," she exclaimed sarcastically, "might be a good time to get at the truth about those wonderful swimming lessons!"
Mrs. Westfall stopped in her tracks. "Perhaps it would," she said with a murderous look at Mrs. Mandeville; and, turning Biscuit around so that he faced the meeting she asked in a wheedling tone: "You could swim all right, couldn't you, dearie?"
"I du-du-don't know!" he blubbered.
"Don't know!" she demanded giving his shoulder an angry shake. "Don't know! Why don't you know?"
"I—uh—uh—ain't been in the wu-wu-water yet!"
A crimson flush spread over Mrs. Westfall's scowling visage as she cried, "Oh! You haven't, eh! You haven't!"
She seized him by one of his unornamented ears and marched him down the aisle towards the front door, where she relieved him of the shawl and pointing a trembling finger at the door almost screamed: "Get out of that door!... Go down to that swimming-hole just as fast as your legs will carry you, and don't you come back till you've found out whether you can swim or not!"
And while the question of taking a correspondence course in Philanthropy—the Science of Giving was being gently but everlastingly laid on the table, Biscuit was retracing his steps to the swimming-hole with less precipitation and much more modesty than he had left it. More than once he longed for the cartoonist's favorite barrel as he dodged from tree to tree to escape the prying gaze of an inconsiderate public.
Fate dealt him a cruel blow when he sought to avoid meeting two old ladies by slipping behind a clump of lilac bushes in Rude's front yard; for from underneath the very bushes themselves came the shocked observation of the voice he loved best in all the world:
"I don't know what game you think you're playin', Karl Westfall, but it's not a very nice game! I think you're horrid anyway—!"