“If you were going to be playing near the Whitman station to-morrow I’d pick you up and take you on a twenty-mile spin.  I’m lunching with some people near Whitman, and going on to Elmville.”

“Oh, pickles!” said I.  “Will you, really?  Of course, I’ll be there.  I’ll drive over with the expressman—­he’s a friend of mine—­right after lunch,” I said, “and I’ll wait around the station for you.”

So I did that, and while I was waiting I saw Aunt Elizabeth coming—­I saw her first, so I hid—­I was afraid if she saw me she’d find out I was going with Dr. Denbigh and snatch him herself.  I heard her sending a crazy telegram to Harry Goward, and then I forgot all about it until I wanted to distract Alice’s mind off some cookies that I’d accumulated at Lorraine’s house.  Alice is a pig.  She never lets me stuff in peace.  So I told her about the telegram—­I knew Alice would be perturbed with that.  She just loves to tell things, but she made me tell Peggy, and there was a hullabaloo promptly.  Nobody confided a word to me, and I didn’t care much, but I saw them all whispering in low tones and being very busy about it, and Peg looking madder than a goat, and I guessed that Alice had made me raise Cain.

Now, I’ve got to back up and start over.  Golly! it’s harder than you’d think just to write down things the way they happened, like I promised Lorraine.  Let’s see—­Oh yes, of course—­about Dr. Denbigh and the bubble.  I was in a fit for fear dear Aunt Elizabeth would linger around till the doctor came, and then somehow I’d be minus one drive in a machine.  She didn’t; she cleared out with solidity and despatch, and my Aurora, as the school-teacher would say, came in his whirling car, and in I popped, and we had a corking time.  He let me drive a little.  You see, the machine is a—­Oh, well, Lorraine said, specially, I was not to describe automobiles.  That seems such a stupid restrictiveness, but it’s a case of cookies, so I’ll cut that out.

There really wasn’t much else to tell, only that Dr. Denbigh started right in and raked out the inmost linings of my soul about Peggy and Harry Goward.  It wasn’t exactly cross-examination, because he wasn’t cross, yet he fired the questions at me like a cannon, and I answered quick, you bet.  Dr. Denbigh knows what he wants, and he means to get it.  Just by accident toward the last I let out about that day in the winter when they were chaffing Aunt Elizabeth at the table about him, and how he’d taken her out in the machine, and how mother had said there might be an engagement to write Peggy about.

“Oh!” said Dr. Denbigh.  “Oh!—­oh!”

Funny, the way he went on saying, “Oh!  Oh!”

I thought if that interested him he might like to hear about Peg throwing a fit in her room after, so I told him that, and how I tried to comfort her, and how unreasonable she was.  And what do you suppose he said?  He looked at me a minute with his eyebrows away down, and his mouth jammed together, and then he brought out: