The initial step was taken a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, when a daintily-engraved card was issued from Mt. Vernon Street, which read:
"Your company is respectfully requested on the evening of the tenth of December at a reception to be given to Bruce Douglas, the author of Blennerhassett."
One evening, Quincy ran up the steps of the Mt. Vernon Street house. He opened the door and started to run up the stairs to his wife's room, as was his custom, when he came into collision with a young lady, who, upon closer inspection, he found to be his sister Maude.
"Come in here," she said. She grasped him by the arm, and, dragging him into the parlor, she closed the door behind him.
"Oh, Mr. Man!" she cried, "I've found you out, but horses sha'n't drag it out of me. No, Quincy, you're always right, and I won't peach. But 'twas mean not to tell me."
Quincy looked at her in voiceless astonishment. "What do you mean, Maude, and where did you gather up all that slang?"
"I might ask you," said Maude, "where you found your wife. I've been talking to her upstairs. She must have thought that papa and mamma knew all about it, for she told me who she was, just as easy. Who is she, Quincy?"
He drew his sister down beside him on a sofa. "She was Miss Mary Alice Pettengill. She is now known to a limited few, of which you, sister Maude, are one, as Mrs. Mary Alice Sawyer; but she is known to a wide circle of readers as Bruce Douglas, the author of many popular stories, as also of that celebrated book entitled Blennerhassett."
"Is that so?" cried Maude; "why, papa is wild over that book. He's been reading it aloud to us evenings, and he said last night that that young man—you hear, Quincy?—that young man, had brought the truth to the surface at last."
"Now, Maude," said Quincy, "you go right home and keep your mouth shut a little while longer, and when you are sixteen"—"the ninth of next January," broke in Maude—"I'll give you a handsome gold watch, with my picture in it."