“Do you still think it’s all right about his having two names?” asked Babbie. “Did you depend on what he told you about that, or did you make other inquiries?”
“About his having two names?” repeated Billy questioningly.
“The two that Betty wrote John about,” Babbie reminded him.
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” Billy persisted. When Betty had explained, he assured her that John never got her letter. “But Trevelyan must have counted on your letting us know,” he said. “Gee! but he had nerve to keep on when he knew he was suspected. I wonder—do you suppose that had anything to do with his not finding you sooner yesterday? My cab-man didn’t have the least trouble to-day, I noticed.”
“And he sat near you while you were here. I remember that,” contributed Babe. “But how about the dance? What was his object in planning that?”
Billy hesitated. “The consul gave me a good fatherly talk, and he had a pretty gruesome suggestion about that ball. He says Fontainebleau—that’s where the countess lives, you know—is on the edge of a great forest, and that you could get a stranger out there and drive him off somewhere and rob him without half trying.” He turned to Babbie. “Do you remember our guying him about your money and your ring? Well, I think that was undoubtedly his scheme. But when you hung back and he knew that you had probably heard Miss Wales’s story, why then he cooked up a substitute. My checks wouldn’t have been safe plunder, so there was no use in holding me up.”
Babbie shivered. “I guess on the edge of a real adventure is as near as I want to be. Think of being driven into a forest and robbed!”
Billy looked very solemn, too. “Please don’t think of it,” he advised her. “I’d have given a lot more than two hundred dollars to keep you out of a thing like that.”
“Have you got your passage home?” asked Betty, so seriously that every one burst out laughing.
“I have,” Billy assured her, “all nicely paid for. And I shan’t send home for more money, not if I have to pawn the beautiful garments that I had made on Bond Street, expressly for the countess’s ball. How Trevelyan must have enjoyed watching me order those clothes! Well, he deserved to get some fun out of it. Sight-seeing with me probably bored him awfully, if he wasn’t as new to London as he pretended to be, and all his clever little contrivances must have kept him working overtime. Lots of honest men earn two hundred a month without taking half the trouble.”