"And Charlotte doesn't want to marry you?"
"Heavens and earth!" he exploded. "Who put the idea into your head that I wanted to marry her?"
"You did"—calmly.
"Then, for pity's sake, let me take it out, quick. If I were the last man on earth, Miss Farnham wouldn't marry me; and if she were the last woman, I think I'd go drown myself in the lake!"
The young woman of the many metamorphoses was laughing again, and this time the laugh was a letter-perfect imitation of a school-girl giggle.
"My!" she said. "How dreadfully hard she must have sat on you!"
"Please don't laugh," he pleaded; "unless you are the heartless kind of person who would laugh at a funeral. I'm down under the hoofs of the horses, at last, Margery, girl. Before you came, I was wondering if the game were at all worth the candle."
Her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. "The battle is over, and won," she said, speaking softly. "Didn't you know that?" And then: "Oh, boy, boy! but it has been a desperate fight! Time and again I have thought you were gone, in spite of all I could do!"
"You thought—I was gone? Then you know?"
"Of course I know; I have known ever since the first night; the night when I found the money in your suit-case. What a silly, silly thing it was for you to do—to leave the Bayou State Security slips on the packages!"