"All proverbs," intercepted my Husband a bit abruptly, "are best proved by their antithesis. We do at least know that there is at times—a considerable streak of dishonor among saints!"
"Eh?—What's that—I didn't quite catch it," beamed the Bridegroom.
But my Husband's entire attention seemed focused rather suddenly on the Stranger.
"So you'd much better stay right on here where you are!" he adjured him with some accent of authority. "Where all explanations are already given and taken! . . . Ourselves quite opportunely short one guest and long one guest-room, and—No! I won't listen for a moment to its being called an 'imposition'!" protested my Husband. "Not for a moment! Only, of course, I must admit," he confided genially, above the flare of a fresh cigarette, "that it would be a slight convenience to know your name."
"My name?" flushed the Stranger. "Why, of course! It's Allan John."
"You mean 'John Allan'," corrected the May Girl very softly.
"No," insisted the Stranger. "It's Allan John." Quite logically he began to rummage through his pockets for the proof. "It's written on my bill-folder," he frowned. "It's in my check-book. . . . It's written on no-end of envelopes." With his face the color of half-dead sedge grass he sank back suddenly into his chair and turned his empty hands limply outward as though his wrist-bones had been wrung. "Gone!" he gasped. "Stripped!—Everything!"
"There you have it!" I babbled hysterically. "Now, how do you know but what we are burglars? . . . This whole house a Den of Thieves? . . . The impeccable Mr. George Keets there at your right,—no more, no less, than exactly what he looks,— an almost perfect replica of a stage 'Raffles'?"
"Eh? What's that?" bridled George Keets.
"Dragging you here to this house the way we did," I floundered desperately. "Quite helpless as you were. So— so——"