"Why, I—I wouldn't marry you if you were ten times the last man in the world!"
"But——"
"No!" Mary said quite wildly.
"There is not another thing to do," Anthony informed her, with a forlorn, heart-broken smile. "Your good name——"
"You'll find some other way of preserving my good name!" Mary said warmly. "I'm engaged now to the very finest man in the whole world!"
"You're engaged!" Anthony cried intelligently.
"Yes, and he's a sane man, too, and he doesn't cry over the prospect of marrying me!" the young woman hurtled on. "He's a real man, and if he ever finds out that you made me stay here all last night, he'll ignore the circumstances and shoot you just as sure as you're sitting there!"
She stopped, breathing hard, and shook her head at Anthony Fry, so that the red-gold curls tumbled about quite riotously. Anthony, blinking, said nothing at all, but his friend Johnson Boller took to muttering, rather like a perturbed hen.
As a matter of fact, Boller was downright fond of Anthony, and the prospect of having him slain in cold blood was very distressing. Turning helpful for the first time, Johnson Boller was on the point of trying to think up ways and means of getting Mary out—but Mary herself was speaking again.
"And don't think that that ridiculous proposal lifts any responsibility from your shoulders, either!" she said, energetically. "It doesn't!"