“You mean I am! I daresay! Well, I don’t care! I thought that must have been it—I didn’t see what else it could have been! And the poor man was so thirsting to hear anything I could tell him about you, that I should have been a brute not to!” declared my chum, plaintively defiant. “So I just said everything I could—about that photograph, and all!”
“What photograph?” I snapped.
“Why, that one of Mr. Vandeleur. I recognized him from that, the moment Mrs. Skinner let him in. And I told him that it was the one and only portrait of a young man that you seemed to possess, and that you always keep it in a silver frame beside your looking-glass. Now, Tots, you can’t say you don’t!”
No; I couldn’t.
“And that cheered him up so, poor fellow! He said—Oh, isn’t it a tragedy?” interpolated Cicely with zest—“that I’d given him fresh hope to go away with!”
“Fresh fiddlesticks,” I muttered, still more savagely.
“You mean there isn’t any?”
“I mean,” I explained as patiently as I could, “that a girl can’t be engaged to two men at once.”
“Then who’s this other, Tots, that you’ve never said a word about? He can’t possibly be fit to hold a candle to—I mean, who is it?”