“But how can we be sure nobody else chooses either Harry or Ralph?”
“Oh, nobody will. They’ll know enough to leave them for Betty. But I’ll whisper to Constance and a few of the girls to make sure.”
The scheme worked well. Lena, in burlesque authority, ordered each fair damsel to choose the knight she most admired, to escort her to supper.
This made great fun, as each girl deliberately ignored the boy she liked best, and chose a brother or a comparative stranger. Betty had made up her mind to choose Jack, and thus evade an embarrassing decision between her two admirers.
But, as one girl after another was called, Betty began to surmise there was some joke in progress.
But Lena said to her, casually, “You and I will go last, Betty,” and so she really suspected little.
But at last no boys were left but Ralph and Harry, and, as Lena announced with twinkling eyes that Betty must make her choice, she saw at once that the girls had pre-arranged this.
It was a difficult situation. Betty had no wish to offend either boy by choosing the other, and she was decidedly in a quandary. She stood looking at them and smiling.
“It’s so hard to choose between you,” she said, provokingly, but really to gain time. Suddenly she bethought herself of the penny in her pocket! Ah, here was a way to circumvent those mischievous girls!
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a little sigh, “that I can’t choose either of you very gentlemanly appearing boys. But my Fate was foretold me, and the talisman that I have here bids me await the coming of the knight appointed for me by Destiny.”