"Night-lunch carts?" scoffed Keets, with what seemed to me like rather unnecessary acerbity. "N-o, somehow I don't seem to picture you in a night-lunch cart when it comes time to share your last bottle of champagne with—with—'Miss Dancy- Prancy of the Sillies,' wasn't it?"
"My last bottle isn't champagne!" flared young Kennilworth. "It's scotch! . . . And there'll be no Miss Anybody in it, thank you!" His face was really angry, and one twitch of his foot had knocked half his village into chaos. "Oh, all right, I'll tell you what I'm going to do with my last bottle!" he frowned. "The next-to-the-last-one, as you say, is none of your business! But the last one is going to my Old Man! . . . I come from Kansas," he acknowledged a bit shamefacedly. "From a shack no bigger than this room . . . And my Old Man lives there yet . . . And he's always been used to having a taste of something when he wanted it and I guess he misses it some. . . . And he'll be eighty years old the 15th of next December. I'm going home for it. . . . I haven't been home for seven years. . . . But my Old Man is going to get his scotch! . . . If they yank me off at every railroad station and shoot me at sunrise each new day,—my Old Man is going to get his scotch!
"Bully for you," said George Keets.
"All the same," argued the May Girl, "I think benedictine smells better."
With a little gaspy breath somebody discovered what had happened to the Village.
"Who did that?" demanded Paul Brenswick.
"You did!" snapped young Kennilworth.
"I didn't, either," protested Brenswick.
"Why of all cheeky things!" cried the Bride.
"Now see here," I admonished them, "you're all very tired and very irritable. And I suggest that you all pack off to bed."