"There, now we will not quarrel any more. Some things I want to know. You will tell me. You have heard him singing? Sometimes he sings a little?"
"I suppose so. I never noticed particularly. Yes, I remember when he was a kid he used to sing something that went, 'Tell me, pretty maiden'—— I can't remember the rest of it. He's got a loud voice, I say that for him. When he was playing out in front of the house with other kids I could always hear him a way above all the others. I guess he's got lungs all right."
"Those he has got from you. If he is the singer, you see, it will not be all my fault."
Maria was leaving for Spain within a few days and Peter said he expected to get back to America pretty soon.
"Here we shall meet on the twentieth in August, in nineteen twenty-two," said Maria. "Good-bye, Peter. I want you to bring my son at eight o'clock."
CHAPTER IV
A few months later while the peace conference was still raging fiercely, Peter was puzzled by a cablegram which he received from America. "Congratulations on your story," it read, "we want more just like it. Convey my respects to President Wilson and tell him I am solidly behind him,—— Twice."
Peter couldn't remember anybody named Twice which made it still more difficult for him to understand why he was being congratulated. He wondered just how urgent was the message to Wilson. Of course it sounded a little bit like somebody on the paper, but the manner was not that of Miles even if he assumed that the signature had been in some way or other so curiously distorted. Cheeves, the Paris correspondent of the Bulletin, solved his perplexity.
"You're kidding me," he said. "It isn't possible that you never heard of Twice. Why, it's Rufus Twice of course, but he always signs just his last name. You know how it is on state documents, 'Lansing,' 'Bryan' or whoever the current boy on the job happens to be."