"Well—just you let her say it again!"
"I don't need to. She's told me, so now I know it."
"You may go down-stairs again, doctor. It's a mistake," said Bep, addressing the medical man. (The twins always tried to keep up appearances before their dolls.) "Mr. Clair—the awfully rich Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair—is not sick at all. But you can send your bill to him anyway, he won't care. It must have been some poor relation of Mrs. Clair's—she didn't have a dress to her name before she married, you know."
"Oh—oh! Bessie Madigan!"
"Well, she didn't," said Bep, stoutly.
"I'll bet you—I'll bet you a shut-up. There!" Cautious Fom rarely hazarded so great a stake; but she felt that the occasion demanded something adequate.
"All right; I'll leave it to Sissy." It was from Sissy that Bep had inherited Mr. Clair. She would know.
Laying down stiff all-china Anita Clair, whose shoes she was painting red to match her sash, Bep followed her twin into the house.
But the omnivorous Sissy was reading "The Boys of England"—a thing Sissy loved to do; for it was a magazine not permitted to enter Mrs. Pemberton's immaculate house, a recommendation in itself, and, besides, Split, to whom Jack Cody had loaned it, was doubtless looking all over for it at this very moment. Lying luxuriously flat upon the floor and eating chocolate, Sissy had just got to that part where Jack Harkaway "with one flash of Abu Hadji's ruby-incrusted simitar decapitated the unfortunate Arab, and Dick Lightheart, seizing the bewitching Haidee, had mounted his horse"—when the belligerent twins found her.
"Now, let me say it," began Fom.