“Probably Lestrange is his second name,” suggested Madeline. “The invitation might have read L. Arthur or Arthur L. Babbie wouldn’t have noticed the initial.”
“But just suppose it isn’t,” Betty argued. “I thought he looked queer, and tried to hurry away, though that may all have been my imagination; but anyhow it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have explained.”
“But he wouldn’t think of explaining if it is his other name,” Madeline persisted, “any more than Babe would think of explaining if some one happened to call her Sarah. However, of course Mr. Benson doesn’t really know anything about him. Let’s suppose he is an adventurer, with aliases and deep-laid schemes for separating the boys from their money. You’d better write and warn them, Betty.”
“Honestly, Betty, you ought,” added Babe, thinking of John’s Australian schemes, which depended more or less on Mr. Trevelyan’s coöperation.
“We shall see them all in the morning,” Babbie reminded them. “And please don’t say anything to mother until you’re sure. She’ll be so horrified to think that she allowed her innocent young daughter and her daughter’s little friends to go around London in such dreadful company.”
So Betty decided to wait until morning. But though the girls scanned the platform anxiously until the train pulled out of the station no one appeared to see them off.
“I knew they wouldn’t come,” Babe confided in savage tones to Betty. “At least I knew John wouldn’t. I did what I told you I would, and he was perfectly horrid—said it was just like a girl to want to decide everything, and that of course he’d like to please me, but he must do what he thought was best. So I gave him back his old cairngorm, and there isn’t any exception to the rule of man-hating, after all. And I’m perfectly miserable, so there now!”
Several days later Babbie got a note from John, forwarded from her Paris address, which seemed to disprove Babe’s theory. They had all three gone to see the girls off, he explained, but Mr. Trevelyan had for once proved unreliable; he had made an unaccountable mistake about the station, which John had discovered too late to correct. So they had waited for the girls at Paddington while the girls watched for them in Waterloo. “He got us there an hour early too,” John wrote. “Insisted that you said eight forty-five instead of nine. And we were all awfully sleepy, because after we left you we took a long ’bus ride through the East End and then stopped on the Embankment for supper. Dwight hasn’t finished reading through the British Museum, so I don’t know when we may get to Paris. However, I still find London very interesting”—a conclusion which made everybody but Babe smile.
This letter crossed with Betty’s note, telling John about the name by which some of Mr. Trevelyan’s English friends knew him; so of course it threw no light on the subject. The girls watched eagerly for another letter, all through the week they spent at Saint Malo, but none came. However, as Madeline remarked, Saint Malo was quite fascinating enough without any adventurer stalking through its streets, and besides, one didn’t need to speculate about imaginary adventures when you were living in the midst of real ones.