“I’m really ashamed to! You would never—”

“Oh, yes, I would; I’m really an old friend!” I insisted, feeling more like an idiot every minute.

“Well, don’t tell! But they caught me flirting—with the grocery boy! Now aren’t you disgusted?”

“Thoroughly! I can’t believe it! Why, you’d a lot better flirt with me,” I suggested boldly.

“Well, I’m to be sent away for good at Christmas. I may come back then if I can square myself. My! That’s slang,—isn’t it horrid?”

“The Sisters don’t like slang, I suppose?”

“They loathe it! Miss Devereux—you know who she is!—she spies on us and tell.”

“You don’t say so; but I’m not surprised at her. I’ve heard about her!” I declared bitterly.

We had reached the door, and I expected her to fly; but she lingered a moment.

“Oh, if you know her! Perhaps you’re a spy, too! It’s just as well we should never meet again, Mr. Glenarm,“ she declared haughtily.

“The memory of these few meetings will always linger with me, Miss Armstrong,” I returned in an imitation of her own tone.

“I shall scorn to remember you!”—and she folded her arms under the cloak tragically.

“Our meetings have been all too few, Miss Armstrong. Three, exactly, I believe!”

“I see you prefer to ignore the first time I ever saw you,” she said, her hand on the door.

“Out there in your canoe? Never! And you’ve forgiven me for overhearing you and the chaplain on the wall—please!”

She grasped the knob of the door and paused an instant as though pondering.

“I make it four times, not counting once in the road and other times when you didn’t know, Squire Glenarm! I’m a foolish little girl to have remembered the first. I see now how b-l-i-n-d I have been.”

She opened and closed the door softly, and I heard her running up the steps within.

I ran back to the chapel, roundly abusing myself for having neglected my more serious affairs for a bit of silly talk with a school-girl, fearful lest the openings I had left at both ends of the passage should have been discovered. The tunnel added a new and puzzling factor to the problem already before me, and I was eager for an opportunity to sit down in peace and comfort to study the situation.

At the chapel I narrowly escaped running into Stoddard, but I slipped past him, pulled the hidden door into place, traversed the tunnel without incident, and soon climbed through the hatchway and slammed the false block securely into the opening.

“I shall scorn to remember you!”—and she folded her arms under the cloak tragically.         Page 164

CHAPTER XIII

A PAIR OF EAVESDROPPERS