"There you go again, Neale," groaned Agnes. "Hinting at Beatrice Severn."
"Well," grinned Neale, "you want me to help you out of your scrape, don't you?"
"At nobody else's expense," said Agnes.
"Don't know what to make of it," grumbled Neale. "It looks fishy to me. Mr. Buckham writing Mr. Marks! I'm going to find out about that. Keep up your pluck, Aggie. I'll see what can be done," and Neale, with his cap on the back of his flaxen head and his hands in his pockets, went off whistling.
CHAPTER VII
THE CORE OF THE APPLE
Dot Kenway came home a day or two after this, quite full of her first "easy lessons in physiology." It always seemed to Dot that when she learned a new fact it was the very first time it had ever been learned by anybody.
"Dot is just like a hen," Neale O'Neil said, chuckling. "She gets hold of a thing and you'd think nobody ever knew it before she did. She is the original discoverer of every fact that gets into her little noddle."
"But how does that make her like a hen?" demanded Ruth.
"Why, a hen lays an egg, and then gets so excited about it and makes such a racket, that you'd think that was the first egg that had been laid since the world began."