"Oh, Miss Gaillard, if you could introduce us to those ladies we would be so grateful to you!" said Zebedee. "You would like to stay there, wouldn't you, girls?"
"And Mrs. Green perhaps will decide to go there, too, and she will look after you, will you not, Mrs. Green?"
"I should be so happy to if the girls would like to have me for a chaperone."
"Oh, we'd love it! We've never had a chaperone in our lives but once, and she got married," tweedled the twins.
And so our compact was made, and Claire promised to see the Misses Laurens in regard to our becoming her "paying guests."
Mr. Green, who, as we found out afterward, was a professor of English at the College of Wellington and had all kinds of degrees that entitled him to be called Doctor, seemed rather amused at his wife's being a chaperone.
"She seems to me still to be nothing but a girl herself," he confided to Zebedee, "although we have got a fine big girl of our own over a year old, whom we have left in the care of my mother-in-law while we have this much talked-of trip together."
"Oh, have you got a baby? Do you know, Dum and I just stood Page down that you were bride and groom!"
"Molly, do you hear that? These young ladies thought we were newlyweds."