"In payment of a debt," he explained gravely when Aunt Kate and Uncle Larry stared and Mary Rose giggled. "She helped me with a very important bit of work," he added, although the addition did not make the matter any clearer to the Donovans nor to Mary Rose.
"You bet she helped me," he told Miss Carter when he went up and met her in the lower hall. They had encountered each other on the stairs several times since the day of Jenny Lind's adventure and had made the amazing discovery that they had formerly lived within fifteen miles of each other and had many mutual friends. "If it hadn't been for Mary Rose, I wouldn't be on the staff of the Waloo Gazette today. They're cutting off heads down there, and I'm sure mine was slated to go, but the chief's strong for human interest stuff, especially kid stuff. He says that every living being, however hard his outside shell is now, was once a kid, and sometime the kid stuff will get to him for the sake of old times. Mary Rose and the cat she's boarding out saved my neck and I'm still a man with a job."
"That's splendid." Miss Carter tried to speak with enthusiasm, but she could not look enthusiastic. She was tired and discontented with life; all the sparkle had gone out of her face.
Bob Strahan saw it and was sorry. "Say," he said impulsively. "I've two tickets for a show in my pocket this minute. You've known me over forty-eight hours. Is that long enough to make it proper for you to go with me? I'll give you the names of the banker and the minister in my old home town and you can call them up on the long distance for references."
"The idea!" A bit of sparkle crept back into Miss Carter's face and she laughed. "Louis Blodgett's chum doesn't need any reference. Louis has told me quite a little about you," significantly. "It seems perfectly ridiculous that you were living right next door and I never knew it."
"And you might not know it now if it hadn't been for Mary Rose and that canary of hers. Gee! I'm glad I took her that box of chocolates."
CHAPTER VIII
With Jenny Lind's cage in her hand, Mary Rose knocked at Miss Thorley's door.
"We've come to have our pictures taken," she told Miss Carter, when she opened it. "The princess, I mean the other lady," she colored pinkly as Miss Carter laughed, "said we were to advertise Mr. Bingham Henderson's jam." Mary Rose always made a careful explanation. "If she would like two birds I'm almost sure that Mrs. Schuneman would loan her Germania."