“What are you talking about, Dorothy?” Ashton Sanborn looked puzzled.
“It’s a cinch you can’t drag a dog along if that’s your big idea,” declared Bill.
“It is not the big idea, old thing.” Dorothy grinned wickedly. “Flash and I have got very clubby this fall. He’s really quite a dear, you know. We travel about together a lot.”
“The mystery of this age,” observed Bill, “is how certain females can talk so much and say so little.”
“Then,” said Dorothy cheerfully, “I’ll let you solve the mystery right now. Catch!” She tossed him a macaroon from a plate on the table. “Go over to that bedroom door,” she commanded. “Stand to one side of the door and throw that thing into the air.”
“But, I say, Dorothy!” interposed Ashton Sanborn. “This is no time for fooling, we’ve got—”
“This is not fooling, you dear old fuss-budget,” she cut in. “It’s—well, it’s just something that may save you from worrying so much about me. Now, Bill, are you ready?”
“Anything to please the ladies,” retorted that young man wearily. He got up and walked to the far end of the room and took his stand beside the closed door. “Is Flash a cake hound? Will he jump for the cookie?”
“He sure will—toss it in the air.”
The small cake went spinning toward the ceiling, and at the same instant Dorothy’s right hand disappeared under the table. With the speed of legerdemain she brought it into view again and her arm shot out suddenly like a signpost across the white cloth. There was a streak of silver light—and the three male members of the quartet stared at the bedroom door in open-mouthed wonder. Quivering in the very center of its upper panel was a small knife, and impaled on the knife’s blade was the macaroon.