“Have you given notice?” Roberta inquired.
“I wrote a note and asked Miss Peerwinkle to give it to Mr. Queerwitz. Come, let us go.”
Half an hour later Nell Wiggin was packing her few garments in a suitcase, while Roberta tied up the precious books. Two hours later the new agent of the model tenements was established in the sunny apartment and her row of red-bound books stood on one shelf of the built-in bookcase.
“Now I will wire my brother Dean that he may come as soon as he wishes; and oh, how I do hope that will be soon,” Nell said as she happily surveyed the pleasantest place that she had ever called home.
The message was sent when they were on their way to the Pensinger mansion for lunch.
“I must not remain long,” the new agent told Gloria, “for I promised Mrs. Doran-Ashley that I would be on duty at one.”
Every little while during that noon meal Bobs would look up with laughing eyes. At last she told the cause of her mirth. “I am wondering what Mr. James Jewett thinks of his assistant detective,” she remarked. “I am so glad that I gave the name Miss Dolittle. Now I can retire from the profession without being traced.”
“Oh, good, here comes the postman,” Lena May declared as she rose and went to the side door to meet the mail-carrier. Gloria looked up eagerly. She was always hoping that Gwendolyn would write. The letters that she had sent to the Newport home of the schoolmate whom Gwendolyn had said that she was going to visit, had been returned, marked “Whereabouts not known.”
There were two letters and both were for Bobs. One was a bulging missive from her Long Island friend, Dick De Laney, but it was at the other that the girl stared as though in uncomprehending amazement. The cause of her very evident astonishment was the printed return address in the upper left-hand corner. It was “Fourth Avenue Branch, Burns Detective Agency.” Then she glanced, still puzzled, at her own name, which was written, not typed.
“Miss Roberta Vandergrift,” she read aloud. Then suddenly she laughed, and looking up at the other girls who, all interest, were awaiting an explanation of her queer conduct, she exclaimed: “The amateur detective has been detected, but how under the shining heavens did Mr. James Jewett know that my name wasn’t Miss Dolittle?”