“I tell you I have your note.”
“And I tell you I wrote no note. Let me see it, please.”
Betty scanned the letter, and then said, very gravely:
“Mr. Irving, I didn’t write that. Some impostor must have represented me.”
“Two of them, in fact,” said Mr. Irving; “here they are.”
Betty looked at Dorothy and Jeanette, seeming to notice them for the first time.
“Oh, I understand,” she said angrily; “these two young women sat behind me in the street-car, and they must have overheard my conversation with a friend to whom I confided my plan of coming to you. Did they claim to be Miss Arundel? Which of them did?”
“Both!” said Mr. Irving, who had grown deeply interested in the queer affair. “They must have deceived each other as well as yourself.”
Dorothy and Jeanette were the personification of discovered culprits.
Dorothy’s face was buried in her handkerchief, and she shook convulsively, apparently with sobs, but really with suppressed laughter. Jeanette looked crestfallen, but still haughty and independent. Her manner seemed to say that she had been discovered, but she was ready to face the consequences.