“Oh!”
“Ah!”
“Dear me!”
“But who?”
“It may be Arthur Selby himself, incog. Who knows?”
“Humph!” growled Crane with a lofty scrowl, “I should think I ought to know Selby. I drank wine with him at—”
His remark was cut short by the arrival of the mail and the general scramble that followed.
Upon this occasion the number of newspapers that fell to the hand of each guest was much greater than usual, and it was soon discovered that Miss Crabb’s latest letter had been forwarded to a “syndicate” and was appearing simultaneously in ninety odd different journals.
No piece of composition ever was more stunningly realistic or more impartially, nay, abjectly truthful than was that letter. It gave a minute account of the quarrel between Peck and Crane over their attentions to Miss Moyne, the fight, Miss Crabb’s fall, the subsequent adventures and all the hotel gossip of every sort. It was personal to the last degree, but it was not in the slightest libelous. No person could say that any untruth had been told, or even that any tinge of false-coloring had been laid upon the facts as recorded; and yet how merciless!
Of course Miss Crabb’s name did not appear with the article, save as one of its subjects, and she saw at once that she had better guard her secret.