"Oh, won't that be lovely!" and Mary almost danced out of her glumps.
"Just think of Grandie here!"
"Now, Mary-love, you promised some of Reda's news. Do tell us before something else happens to put off all our delicious mysteries," implored Madaline, quite as if the telling would give the same joy to Mary as the news would furnish to herself.
"What did she want to warn you of?" prompted Grace.
"Oh, Janos and his men. They were coming out here to take all Grandie's orchids away. And they brought the monkey to scare him. He was dreadfully frightened of a monkey once in the tropics, and Janos knew it, so he just planned that awful trick on him——"
"With our lovely little Boxer! How perfectly absurd," exclaimed Grace, at the risk of spoiling all the thrilling story Mary had undertaken to tell them.
"Yes," went on Mary, "and the night you girls came, that first night, you remember?"
"Yes, when I turned on the lights," inserted Madaline.
"That was the night they first planned to scare Grandie's secret from him. They were all three out in that orchid room, just waiting to break in and—oh, I can't say what they were going to do to get Grandie's secret from him." She was now on the verge of sobbing, and the girls had no idea of letting any such thing occur.
"But Madaline turned the tables," Cleo said cheerily, "and she shooed off the—desperate thieves!" and Cleo again reverted to type as a fiction fixer.
"And the really cruel part of it all was," continued Mary, "Grandie did not know and does not know yet what became of the treasure they are all seeking. He lost it with his memory," she said almost in a whisper. "And it was daddy's just as I was his. I was to be given mother's family with the treasure as a peace offering."