"Go to England! When?" gasped Annie.
"I fancy we can arrange to be off in about a week."
This was news that touched all of us. Annie going to England! We might never see her again, and her dried-up old father was standing there announcing this fact with as much composure as though he had decided to move his store across the road or do something else equally ordinary.
"You see," he continued with his grandiloquent manner, "the demise of my brother and his son, who is unmarried, advance me to the baronetcy, and——"
"Then you are Sir Arthur Ponsonby Pore!" blurted out Dum.
"Exactly!" he announced calmly, as though he had been inheriting titles all his life.
"Is Annie Lady Anna then?" asked Mary.
"No, she is still Miss Pore. Only a son inherits a title from a baronet," he said with a trace of bitterness. I remembered what Annie had told me of her brother's death and her father's resentment of her being a girl.
"Well, she would make a lovely Lady Annie all the same," said Dee. "I bet everybody in England will just about go crazy about her."
"Ah, indeed!" was his supercilious remark to this effusion.