“No, you don’t! No, you don’t!” cried Evelyn. “We have stumbled upon a deep, dark mystery and it must be cleared up at once, at once. Come on, Lucy; who wrote that letter?”
“I tell you I don’t know myself, so how can I tell you?” cried Lucile, angry at herself for being so confused.
“If you don’t know whom it’s from, why do you get all red and snappy and try to hide it?” asked Evelyn, triumphantly. “’Fess up, Lucy. You might as well, first as last, for you can’t fool us.”
“Methinks,” began Jessie, in deep, stentorian tones, “that this writing seems strangely familiar. Where can I have seen it before? Ah, I have it!” Then, suddenly throwing her arms about Lucile in a strangling hug, she cried, “Oh, I knew it, I knew it! I knew he would just go crazy about you, like all the rest of us. He couldn’t help himself! And you never, never would believe anything could happen the way it does in novels—oh—oh——”
“Oh, I see it all! I see it all!” shouted Evelyn, suddenly springing up and whirling about the room, using her letters as a tambourine. “It’s Jessie’s cousin! He’s gone—he’s gone——”
“Girls, you are crazy, both of you!” cried Lucile, extricating herself with difficulty from Jessie’s strangle hold and smoothing back the hair that was tumbling down in the most becoming disorder—or so her two friends would have told you—while her laughing eyes tried hard to look severe. “Probably it isn’t from him at all, and if it is, why—why—well, it is,” she ended, desperately.
“Why, of course it is,” soothed Jessie; “but I don’t think you need worry about it not being from him——”
“Aren’t you going to read it over now?” broke in Evelyn. “Then you can tell us——”
“I wouldn’t tell you a thing,” said Lucile, driven to her last entrenchment; “and what’s more, I’m not going to 116 read it till I get good and ready, and not then if I don’t want to,” and she slipped her letter into her pocketbook, which she closed with a defiant little snap. “Now, what are you going to do about it?” she challenged, gaily.
“We might use force,” mused Jessie, meditatively.