“You’ve seen him? Thank heavens! He is like Gordon, isn’t he? The make-up is astounding. I’ve tried to find out the secret. But he’s so useful about the house. That alone betrays him. Gordon lived in the clouds, where there were no laundry bills and no patent sweepers. And he came in time to be Uncle Isaac. No, we haven’t any real Uncle Isaac, but he served beautifully, and, what is more, he brought with him a perfectly good aunt——”
“The audacious scoundrel!” Bobbie cried wrathfully. “Why, do you know, he nearly deceived me? I wasn’t as clever as you. I talked with him for ten minutes about his troubles. He’s evidently studied every detail of appearance and association. And he makes no mistakes—he called me Bobbie the first time he saw me.”
“He called me Diana. But he didn’t deceive me—not for a moment,” said the girl, flopping into Gordon’s big chair. “This morning I caught him trying to get into Gordon’s dressing-room! He has to be watched day and night, and of course he has a perfectly good excuse for everything he does. He said he wanted some clothes!”
Bobbie thought that a desire to change into clothing less vocal than the suit he was wearing was not reprehensible even in Double Dan. But the audacity of the man!
“The villain! I wish to heaven I hadn’t gone to Ostend.”
She reminded herself that she must ask him why he went at all. That could wait, however.
“I had to arrange everything on the spot,” she said, going back to the hectic moments of Saturday. “Luckily I remembered that little man’s ’phone number—you weren’t here when he told me? Hate, hate, ho, Ammersmith. Then I had to invent a story—oh, positively dozens of stories! They weren’t lies—just expedients. The stroke of genius was the one about Uncle Isaac being eccentric. Happily Dempsi loves him.”
“Who?” asked the startled Bobbie. “Not Uncle Isaac surely? He gave me the impression—but that was in his rôle of Gordon—that he hated him.”
“No, I mean Superbus. He took to him at once—it was the sort of thing he would do. He kept white mice when he was a boy and adored them! Dempsi thinks that he and Mr. Superbus must have both descended from Julius Cæsar. He spent all the morning in the book room searching for Cæsar’s Life.”
“How does Double Dan accept your treatment of him—and your discovery that he was a fake?”