The girl looked at him in complete surprise.  “What in the world—­” she began.

“Oh, I mean it—­every word!” he insisted.  Now that he had plunged in there was no retreating.  “I say, are you going to marry him?”

“I’d be angry with you if you weren’t so terribly amusing, Allen,” she replied, smiling again after the first shock of his outburst.  “Truly, you don’t know how funny you are when you try to be serious.  It doesn’t fit.”

Allen bit his lip.  “I’m a joke still, am I?” he asked, without looking at her.  “I thought it was the pater’s prerogative to consider me that, but I see he didn’t get it patented.”

“Is it being a ‘joke’ when you ask questions which you have no right to ask?”

“If you knew how I feel inside you’d think I had a right.”

The girl relented a little.  “You know as well as I do that Mr. Covington comes here simply to help me in my business education.”

“Business fiddlesticks!” he interrupted, crossly.  “You’re not engaged to him yet, are you?”

There was so pathetic a tone of entreaty in Allen’s voice that Alice could not deny herself the pleasure of being mischievous.

“Not to him alone,” she answered, demurely.

“What do you mean?” Allen demanded, now thoroughly alarmed.

“Don’t you think it is better for a girl to make a number of men comparatively happy by being engaged to them than one man supremely miserable by marrying him?”

He looked at her aghast.  “Who are some of the others?” he asked, with despair written on every feature.  “Is Joe Whitney one of them?”

“Joe Whitney!” Alice laughed merrily.  “Mercy, no!  Joe is entirely without resources.  If it wasn’t for his family troubles, I shouldn’t know what in the world to talk to him about.”

Allen began to be suspicious.  The girl’s manner was far too flippant to be genuine, but he would not for the world give her the satisfaction of knowing that she had worried him.

“If you have so many, why can’t you add me to the list?”

“You?  Oh, that would never do!  You would be sure to think I meant it, and the first thing I knew you would try to make me marry you.”

“Of course I should.  Don’t you want to be married?”

“Marriage is an institution for the blind,” she laughed back at him.

“Then that’s where I want to be confined.”

Alice sat up very straight.  “Then you had better run right along and find your guardian,” she urged.  “We business women have no time for such trifles.”

“So you shirk your responsibility, do you?” Allen looked at her so reproachfully, and spoke with such quiet firmness that she ceased her bantering.

“What responsibility am I shirking?” she demanded.

“Me; I am the greatest responsibility you have, and you are neglecting me shamefully.”

Alice gave evidence of becoming amused again, but he gravely checked her.