“Why, I was just thinkin’ how classy it was,” says I.

“Bah!” says Aunty.  “A lot you know about it.  Are you dressed, young man?”

I admits that I am.

“Then I wish you’d go down there and see if it is Merry,” says she.  “If it is, tell him I say to come home and go to bed.”

“And if it ain’t?” says I.

“Go along and see,” says she.

I begun to be sorry for Merry.  I’d rather pay board than live with a disposition like that.  Down I pikes, out the front door and back through the shrubby.  Meantime the musician has finished “Promise Me” and has switched to “Annie Laurie.”  It’s easy enough to get the gen’ral direction the sound comes from; but I couldn’t place it exact.  First off I thought it must be from a little summer house down by the shore; but it wa’n’t.  I couldn’t see anyone around the grounds.  Out on the far end of the Hibbs’s wharf, though, there was somethin’ dark.  And a swell time I had too, buttin’ my way through a five-foot hedge and landin’ in a veg’table garden.  But I wades through tomatoes and lettuce until I strikes a gravel path, and in a couple of minutes I’m out on the dock just as the soloist is hittin’ up “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms.”  Aunty had the correct dope.  It’s Merry, all right.  The first glimpse he gets of me he starts guilty and tries to hide the cornet under the tails of his dress coat.

“No use, Merry,” says I.  “You’re pinched with the poultry.”

“Wha-a-at!” says he.  “Oh, it’s you, is it, Torchy?  Please—­please don’t mention this to my aunt.”

“She beat me to it,” says I.  “It was her sent me out after you with a stop order.  She says for you to chop the nocturne and go back to the hay.”

“But how did she——­ Oh, dear!” he sighs.  “It was all her fault, anyway.”

“I don’t follow you,” says I.  “But what was it, a serenade?”

“Goodness, no!” gasps J. Meredith.  “Who suggested that?”

“Why, it has all the earmarks of one,” says I.  “What else would you be doin’, out playin’ the cornet by moonlight on the dock, if you wa’n’t serenadin’ someone?”

“But I wasn’t, truly,” he protests.  “It—­it was the champagne, you know.”

“Eh?” says I.  “You don’t mean to say you got stewed?  Not on a couple of glasses!”

“Well, not exactly,” says he.  “But I can’t take wine.  I hardly ever do.  It—­it goes to my head always.  And tonight—­well, I couldn’t decline.  You saw.  Then afterward—­oh, I felt so buoyant, so full of life, that I couldn’t go to sleep.  I simply had to do something to let off steam.  I wanted to play the cornet.  So I came out here, as far away from anyone as I could get.”

“Too thin, Merry,” says I.  “That might pass with me; but with strangers you’d get the laugh.”

“But it’s true,” he goes on.  “And I didn’t dream anyone could hear me from here.”