“That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don't speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it.”
“Yes, but see here, Minver!” Rulledge said with a dazed look. “If it's all a fake of his, how came you to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?”
“That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I knew he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn't strike you. It's the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!”
He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: “That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself—how much he believes of his own fiction.”
“I don't see,” Rulledge said gloomily, “why they're so long with my dinner.” Then he burst out, “I believe every word Halson said. If there's any fake in the thing, it's the fake that Minver owned to.”
THE RUBAIYAT AND THE LINER
ELIA W. PEATTIE
“Chug-chug, chug-chug!”
That was the liner, and it had been saying the same thing for two nights and two days. Therefore nobody paid any attention to it—except Chalmers Payne, the moodiest of the passengers, who noticed it and said to himself that, for his part, it did as well as any other sound, and was much better than most persons' conversation.