I tried to sink out of sight, but they saw me, demolished my barricade, and began to tease me. The quartet were Charlie Murray, George Van B——, Willie, and Page. Behind them came a fifth gentleman, and before this fifth gentleman and I knew what was happening we were being presented to each other. And that is how I met Dan Grey—sitting on the floor in my shabbiest dress and half hidden by evergreens. I soon had the whole party hard at work festooning the hall, and what a good, if late, laborer, Dan Grey made in my vineyard!
“You see how useful I am,” he said—he was standing on a box and I was handing up wreaths of cedar which he was arranging on the wall. “Now, why didn’t you let me come to see you?”
“Me?” I asked in utter bewilderment.
“Yes, ‘me’!”
“Why, I never had a thing to do with your not coming to see me.”
He gave George, Charlie, and Willie a withering look.
“I reckon somebody else didn’t want me to.”
The boys looked dumfounded.
“I heard,” said Dan from his box, “that you didn’t want me to come to see you, that you had an unaccountable prejudice against me because you didn’t like Dick, that you asked all your friends by no means to bring me to see you.”
I was as mad as I could be with George, Willie, and Charlie.