"Heavens!" ejaculated Jimaboy; and then his first thought was the jealous author's. "Isn't it the luckiest thing ever that the spirit didn't move me to sign those things?"
"You might as well have signed them," said Isobel. "You've given our street and number."
"My kingdom!" groaned Jimaboy. "Here—you lock the door behind me, while I go hunt Hasbrouck. It's a duel with siege guns at ten paces, or a suit for damages with him."
He was back again in something under the hour, and his face was haggard.
"We are lost!" he announced tragically. "There is nothing for it now but to run."
"How ever did it happen?" queried Isobel.
"Oh, just as simply and easily as rolling off a log—as such things always happen. Lantermann saw the things on the desk, and your sketches caught him. He took 'em down to show to Hasbrouck, and Hasbrouck, meaning to do us a good turn, marked the skits up for the 'Wit and Humor' page. The intelligent make-up foreman did the rest: says of course he took 'em for ads. and run 'em as ads."
"But what does Mr. Hasbrouck say?"
"He gave me the horse laugh; said he would see to it that the advertising department didn't send me a bill. When I began to pull off my coat he took it all back and said he was all kinds of sorry and would have the mistake explained in to-morrow's paper. But you know how that goes. Out of the hundred and fifty thousand people who will read those miserable squibs to-day, not five thousand will see the explanation to-morrow. Oh, we've got to run, I tell you; skip, fly, vanish into thin air!"
But sober second thought came after a while to relieve the panic pressure. 506 Hayward Avenue was a small apartment-house, with a dozen or more tenants, lodgers, or light housekeepers, like the Jimaboys. All they would have to do would be to breathe softly and make no mention of the Post-Graduate School of W. B. Then the other tenants would never know, and the postman would never know. Of course, the non-delivery of the mail might bring troublesome inquiry upon the Times advertising department, but, as Jimaboy remarked maliciously, that was none of their funeral.