"So you're not married, Annie. Whatever became of that fellow who used to hang round you all the time?"
"Charlie Selby?" She blushed at the name, and thrilled at the luxury of meeting jealousy. "Oh, he entered the church. He's a minister out in Ogden, Utah."
"I always knew he'd never amount to much," was Lathrop's epitaph on his old rival. Then he started with a new twinge: "You bound for Ogden, too?"
"Oh, no," she smiled, enraptured at the new sensation of making a man anxious, and understanding all in a flash the motives that make coquettes. Then she told him her destination. "I'm on my way to China."
"China!" he exclaimed. "So'm I!"
She stared at him with a new thought, and gushed: "Oh, Ira—are you a missionary, too?"
"Missionary? Hell, no!" he roared. "Excuse me—I'm an importer—Anne, I—I——"
But the sonorous swear reverberated in their ears like a smitten bell, and he blushed for it, but could not recall it.
CHAPTER XII
THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK
The almost-married couple sat long in mutual terror and a common paralysis of ingenuity. Marjorie, for lack of anything better to do, was absent-mindedly twisting Snoozleums's ears, while he, that pocket abridgment of a dog, in a well meaning effort to divert her from her evident grief, made a great pretence of ferocity, growling and threatening to bite her fingers off. The new ring attracted his special jealousy. He was growing discouraged at the ill-success of his impersonation of a wolf, and dejected at being so crassly ignored, when he suddenly became, in his turn, a center of interest.