“It would serve her right,” I said, “to let her come and stay with them here in our absence. She’d get the cure for enjoyment all right. Rob wrote of them in the same strain and says he, too, is curious to meet the missing links.”
“Does she know,” asked Silvia, “how Rob regards women?”
“No; I’ve always made some excuse to her for not having them meet. I didn’t 69 want to hear her make disparaging remarks about him, and she is such a flirt, she’d try to draw him out and he would shut up like a clam.”
“Well, I think,” decided Silvia, “that the best way out of it is to write Rob to postpone his visit and I will write Beth to come direct to Hope Haven.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “that will be fine. She shall have charge of dear little Di and study the evolutions of the Polydores later.”
I approved this plan. So we wrote our letters and stealthily, but joyously, prepared for our getaway, leaving the house like thieves in the night and bearing the sleeping cherub, Diogenes.
Silvia sighed in relief when we were aboard the train.
“I feel quite chesty,” she declared, “at being smart enough to outwit Ptolemy, the wizard.”
“I have the feeling,” I observed forebodingly, “that they may be on the train or underneath it.”