"Telling you that you didn't know him?" asked Uncle Bob.
"Certainly, he should have said at the very beginning, 'Miss Bentley, you are mistaken in thinking you know me.'"
"Ha! ha!" laughed Uncle Bob.
"Now what are you laughing at?" his niece demanded. "Honestly, don't you think he should have?" But she laughed herself.
"Well, perhaps," he owned, reflecting, however, that if Margaret Elizabeth looked half so alluring that morning as she did now in her grey-blue frock, with her bright hair a bit tumbled, it was asking a good deal of human nature.
"Now, of course, Uncle Bob, this is strictly confidential. I wouldn't have Dr. Prue know for the world. It is bad enough to have Aunt Eleanor smiling sarcastically, though she doesn't know half. I think I have at length quieted her, and the great Augustus is entirely mollified." She paused to laugh again, then continued tragically, "Sympathy is what I need now. To begin with, it was the most perfect day—the sort to make you forget tiresome conventions."
Uncle Bob nodded. "Perhaps he forgot, too," he suggested.
Margaret Elizabeth bit her lip. "That's true. I must try to be fair. He had nice eyes, Uncle Bob—with a twinkle in them." A smile played over her lips, her dimple came and went. She gazed absently at the curling flame. Suddenly she rose from her ottoman, and seated herself bolt upright on the sofa with one of the plumpest cushions behind her. "All the same it was inexcusable in me," she declared sternly.
"What was?" asked her uncle.
"The nonsense I talked. About a Fairy Godmother Society! No doubt he was laughing in his sleeve all the time."