Again Mr. John C. Bedelle smiled.
"Oh, we know a trick or two, even if we're still in school."
Miss Mimi's look was not such as is generally ascribed to the gentler sex. She bit her lip and said furiously:
"You just tell Mr. Sidell—" and then, quite suffocated with rage, she stopped and flung a little fan, furiously, across the room.
"Now I see her as she is," thought Skippy with a healing delight. Aloud he added: "Oh, if you really want to know the truth about Sidell, just ask Sis. She probably put him up to the whole game."
Now this was rather crude, and at another time Miss Lafontaine would have detected the artifice and consequently divined the whole fabrication, but at present she was quite too angry, particularly when she realized that her best friend was a witness to her discomfiture.
"Just what do you mean by that?" she said angrily.
"Why, they've been sweet on each other for a couple of years," he said, with malice aforethought. "Guess you're not on to Sis. She'd steal anything with pants on that came within a mile of her. Ask her sometime about the mash notes the plumber's boy used to shoot up to her window, or perhaps you'd better not, it gets her too hot. But anyway I advise you to keep your eyes open." He rose, for the sudden shifting of the slippers back of the sofa warned him it was time to depart.
"Good-bye, Mimi," he said carelessly. "Two can play the same game, remember that."
Then, calculating the moment, he bumped into the étagère, upsetting the goldfish, and as the dripping figure of Miss Clara Bedelle emerged with a scream, Mr. Skippy Bedelle, Chesterfieldian to the last, departed saying: