“I wonder if I couldn’t guess,” interrupted the man with the strong brown arms. “It’s about me, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” admitted Nancy, slowly.
“And about—about my supposed magic powers.” He stopped and enjoyed a light laugh himself. “Wouldn’t it be tragic if I should disappear just now?” he said so suddenly, that Nancy jerked her paddle out of the water and stared at him with a sort of guilty flush.
“The idea—” she faltered.
“Ha, ha, ha!” roared the big man swinging toward the shore where Jack and Billy were to land. “That’s a great story, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you,” he lowered his voice in a tone of confidence, “I am altogether to blame for that fantastic yarn, but sometimes we have to let folks guess even if they do make—spooks out of us.” He laughed again and even the little boys were now being tempted to join in. “But I want to promise you and your brother this, Nancy,” he said seriously. “You shall be among the first to know the answer to the riddle of my magic disappearance around the gray stone house.”
“Thank you,” Nancy managed to say, as Ted caught a strong little branch on shore, and helped land the canoe.
CHAPTER XVIII
INTRODUCING NERO
It did not seem possible that Manny’s school had been successfully opened two weeks ago! That the girls in her class, at first numbering eight now counted fourteen, each paying five dollars for the month’s training in domestic science, with lessons three mornings a week. Fourteen pupils at five dollars each and every single one paid in advance, while Nancy was acting as class president and Ruth as class secretary; these were, indeed, auspicious arrangements.
And besides the seventy dollars paid Miss Manners for tuition, the class members brought their own supplies and were privileged to take them home with them, in the form of various tempting dishes, “the like of which” as Nancy expressed it, “never had been seen in Long Leigh before nor since.”
“Maybe you don’t know you’re a wonder,” Ruth remarked very casually to Nancy, while she, as secretary, was consulting with Nancy as president. “I can cook better now than I ever expected to in my whole life. And as for Isabel! She’s so enthusiastic, her mother says she has to restrain her from going into the boarding house business. You should just taste Belle’s 'Cherry Moss.’ Um-m-m! It was de-lic-ious!” and Ruth smacked her lips to the echo. “Her brother Tom wanted to know why we didn’t make up a class for boys. He was in the army, you know, and so thinks himself very efficiently trained.”