“Please, Ellen,—­if it’s about—­”

“Well, it is.”

Fanny’s eyes pleaded hungrily with the naughty Ellen.

“You haven’t finished your account of that interesting pleasure excursion of Jim’s and Miss Orr’s,” said Ellen.  “Isn’t it lovely Jim can drive her car?  Is he going to be her regular chauffeur?  And do you get an occasional joy-ride?”

“Of course not,” Fanny said indignantly.  “Oh, Ellen, how can you go on like that!  I’m sure you don’t care a bit about Jim or me, either.”

“I do!” declared Ellen.  “I love you with all my heart, Fan; but I don’t know about Jim.  I—­I might have—­you know; but if he’s crazy over that Orr girl, what’s the use?  There are other men, just as good-looking as Jim Dodge and not half so sarcastic and disagreeable.”

“Jim can be disagreeable, if he wants to,” conceded Jim’s sister.  “When I asked him where he was going with the car so early in the morning—­you know he’s been bringing the car home nights so as to clean it and fix the engine, till she can get somebody—­I was surprised to find him putting in oil and tightening up screws and things, when it was scarcely daylight; and I said so.  He wouldn’t tell me a thing.  ’You just ‘tend to your own knitting, Fan,’ was all he said; ’perhaps you’ll know some day; and then again, perhaps you won’t.’”

“And didn’t you find out?” cried Ellen, her dark eyes alight with curiosity.  “If that doesn’t sound exactly like Jim Dodge!  But you said you heard him when he came in that night; didn’t he tell you anything then?—­You don’t think they ran off to get married?  Oh, Fan!”

“Of course not, you goose!  Do you suppose he’d have come back home alone, if it had been anything like that?”

Ellen heaved a sigh of exaggerated relief.

“’Be still, my heart’!” she murmured.

“No; they went to get somebody from somewhere,” pursued Fanny.

“To get somebody from somewhere,” repeated Ellen impatiently.  “How thrilling!  Who do you suppose it was?”

Fanny shook her head: 

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“How perfectly funny! ...Is the somebody there, now?”

“I don’t know.  Jim won’t tell me a thing that goes on there.  He says if there’s anything on top of the earth he absolutely despises it’s a gossiping man.  He says a gossiping woman is a creation of God—­must be, there’s so many of ’em; but a gossiping man—­he can’t find any word in the dictionary mean enough for that sort of a low-down skunk.”

Ellen burst into hysterical laughter.

“What an idea!” she gasped.  “Oh, but he’s almost too sweet to live, Fan.  Somebody ought to take him down a peg or two.  Fan, if he proposes to that girl, I hope she won’t have him.  ’Twould serve him right!”

“Perhaps she won’t marry anybody around here,” mused Fanny.  “Did you ever notice she wears a thin gold chain around her neck, Ellen?”