“Jim can be disagreeable, if he wants to,” conceded Jim’s sister. “When I asked him where he was going with the car so early in the morning—you know he’s been bringing the car home nights so as to clean it and fix the engine, till she can get somebody—I was surprised to find him putting in oil and tightening up screws and things, when it was scarcely daylight; and I said so. He wouldn’t tell me a thing. ‘You just ’tend to your own knitting, Fan,’ was all he said; ‘perhaps you’ll know some day; and then again, perhaps you won’t.’”
“And didn’t you find out?” cried Ellen, her dark eyes alight with curiosity. “If that doesn’t sound exactly like Jim Dodge! But you said you heard him when he came in that night; didn’t he tell you anything then?—You don’t think they ran off to get married? Oh, Fan!”
“Of course not, you goose! Do you suppose he’d have come back home alone, if it had been anything like that?”
Ellen heaved a sigh of exaggerated relief.
“‘Be still, my heart’!” she murmured.
“No; they went to get somebody from somewhere,” pursued Fanny.
“To get somebody from somewhere,” repeated Ellen impatiently. “How thrilling! Who do you suppose it was?”
Fanny shook her head:
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“How perfectly funny! ...Is the somebody there, now?”