“You don’t claim to be—— Don’t tell me that you are—— Then you’re not a breakfast-food?”
“Nothing so enlivening. Not even anti-fat,” he apologized in broad-smiling return.
“Oh—oh!” she gasped. “You couldn’t have overheard what I said in the car coming down?”
“From the curb, Miss Sturgis.”
“And you recognized me here in the box and that’s why—Dar-rling—” the endearment was drawled with a brief glance toward her relative—“isn’t that just too utterly romantic?”
“I hope, Irene, not too utterly.”
Jane’s quiet reply started a smile wreathing around the little circle, evidently of amusement over the child-vamp’s personal assumption of all honors.
Samuel Allen interposed in a tone of butter-melting benignity: “Any friend of Miss Lauderdale is more than welcome to our city so far as I am concerned.”
“Rawther! And welcome—thrice welcome to our midst,” the madcap again interpolated, seizing one of his large, brown hands in both her white, bejeweled, small ones.
“Dee-lighted!” Pape breathed, returning the extra shake.