“I never bet,” Babe returned laughingly. “But if I see your father again—he told us he hoped we might meet somewhere over in France—I’ll mention the race and invite him to take me to it.”
“But if I go, I shall want to take you myself,” objected John.
“Humph!” observed Babe, “it seems to me that Mr. Jasper J. Morton has not monopolized all the contrariety there is in the family.”
CHAPTER XI
BETTY WALES, DETECTIVE
Billy Benson lost no time in accepting the girls’ invitation to call on them. On the evening of the day after the ghost-hunt that developed into a tea-drinking, Billy appeared, arrayed in the “glad rags” that he had cajoled his Bond Street tailor into finishing long before the stipulated time. Finding that Mrs. Hildreth was hesitating a little about including the Harvard-Cambridge race in her itinerary, he set himself to cajole her—with equal success. First he told funny stories to make her laugh; then he unearthed the fact that his mother and she had been girlhood friends; then he alluded casually to English sports, and offered to take her to a cricket-match the next afternoon; finally he smiled his famous smile and asked her if she honestly wouldn’t like to see that race he had told the girls about. Of course he wanted to row his very best, for the honor of Harvard and the United States of America; and he could do any amount better if he knew that some good friends of his would be watching him and cheering for the crimson. Whereupon Mrs. Hildreth laughed at his ingenious reasoning and commissioned Babbie and Madeline to see about engaging passage back from an English port. And Billy, thanking her with charming deference, and taking an early and ceremonious leave, reflected, as he often had before, that it was easy enough to get things your way if you only took a little pains to be agreeable.
John Morton, on the other hand, bitterly regretted the girls’ change of plan. “I know I shan’t be here for the race,” he told Babe, “and I can’t go over to Paris when you do, because old Dwight won’t be through with his reading at the British Museum. I might skip off with Billy, I suppose, but my father would be furious if he ever found it out.”
“You mustn’t do that,” Babe advised him. “It wouldn’t be the square thing at all. Besides, we’re not going straight to Paris. We’re going to Saint something. I forget the name, but it’s a seaside place up in Brittany. Madeline says it’s lovely. So you may get to Paris as soon as we do after all.”
“I hope so. Anyway I think you ought to go sight-seeing in London now and not waste time over shopping. You can do that just as well in September when I’m not here.”
“And in that way we won’t have the things we buy to lug around in the meantime,” added Babe; but it is doubtful if this practical consideration had very much to do with the sudden subsidence of her shopping mania.
Of course Babe told all the girls that Jasper J. Morton, the Grasmere automobilist, and John’s father were one and the same person. But only to Betty did she confide the story of the letter that had so disheartened John.