“I want you to come at once to Dr. Rabbet’s,—­yes, the rectory, next door to St. Luke’s.  Patricia and I are to be married there in half an hour.  We are on our way to the City Hall to get the license now....  No, she might change her mind again, you see....  I have not the least notion how it happened.  I don’t care....  Then you will have to be rude to him or else not see your only daughter married....  Kindly permit me to repeat, sir, that I don’t care about that or anything else.  And for the rest, Patricia was twenty-one last December.”

The colonel hung up the receiver.  “And now,” he said, “we are going to the City Hall.”

“Are you?” said Patricia, with courteous interest.  “Well, my way lies uptown.  I have to stop in at Greenberg’s and get a mustard plaster for the parrot.”

He had his hat by this.  “It isn’t cool enough for me to need an overcoat, is it?”

“I think you must be crazy,” she said, sharply.

“Of course I am.  So I am going to marry you.”

“Let me go—!  Oh, and I had thought you were a gentleman—.”

“I fear that at present I am simply masculine.”  He became aware that his hands, in gripping both her shoulders, were hurting the girl.

“Come now,” he continued, “will you go quietly or will I have to carry you?”

She said, “And you would, too—.”  She spoke in wonder, for Patricia had glimpsed an unguessed Rudolph Musgrave.

His hands went under her arm-pits and he lifted her like a feather.  He held her thus at arm’s length.

“You—­you adorable whirligig!” he laughed.  “I am a stronger animal than you.  It would be as easy for me to murder you as it would be for you to kill one of those flies on the window-pane.  Do you quite understand that fact, Patricia?”

“Oh, but you are an idiot—.”

“In wanting you, my dear?”

“Please put me down.”

She thoroughly enjoyed her helplessness.  He saw it, long before he lowered her.

“Why, not so much in that,” said Miss Stapylton, “because inasmuch as I am a woman of superlative charm, of course you can’t help yourself.  But how do you know that Dr. Rabbet may not be somewhere else, harrying a defenseless barkeeper, or superintending the making of dress-shirt protectors for the Hottentots, or doing something else clerical, when we get to the rectory?”

After an irrelevant interlude she stamped her foot.

“I don’t care what you say, I won’t marry an atheist.  If you had the least respect for his cloth, Olaf, you would call him up and arrange—­Oh, well! whatever you want to arrange—­and permit me to powder my nose without being bothered, because I don’t want people to think you are marrying a second helping to butter, and I never did like that Baptist man on the block above, anyhow.  And besides,” said Patricia, as with the occurrence of a new view-point, “think what a delicious scandal it will create!”