Arizona Republican

TWO FLATS AND AN ACCIDENTAL
The suggestion that brought it all about came from me, I believe. Suggestions of any sort usually came from me rather than Margery, for I have in my veins the adventurous blood of stanch New England ancestry, who had burned witches and fought Indians and later pursued a relentless traffic in wooden nutmegs with the same high courage and fine disregard of consequences. While Margery is of Dutch descent and inclined to be cautious, if not a bit pig-headed, as I often told her. But no one could help loving her, in spite of her little touch of Dutch obstinacy, least of all myself, for of all the provoking little women that were ever created for the express purpose of charming and tormenting their fellow men Margery was the most deliciously dear, and I loved her so well I could forgive her anything. That is, anything but the way she treated Jack Beasley. The dance she led that poor fellow was something to move even a bearded Turk to pity. For a whole year she had kept him dangling after her as abjectly as a dancing doll at the end of a string, and yet, as far as we could see, he had made no progress whatever in her wayward affections. We had been talking things over, Jack, Ned and I, in Margery's absence (I never dared mention Jack to Margery for fear of still further exciting that famous obstinacy of hers), and even Ned, the most hopeful of mortals, had had to admit Jack's chances looked blue. Ned, be it known, was the daring youth who had undertaken to guide my New England enterprise and other virtues (too numerous to mention) through life's pilgrimage. He and Jack were partners in a law office and occupied the flat on the top floor, where they called light housekeeping floor, where they indulged in certain mysterious rites they called light housekeeping, while Margery and I taught music and Delsarte and practiced the modest virtues of hospitality in the flat below. Nothing, therefore, could have been more fit, suitable and otherwise to be desired than to have Margery and Jack fall in love with each other, even as Ned and I had done. Jack was willing enough, poor boy, but Margery balked. It was too provoking. As I said before, we three had been talking it over the day before while Margery was absent teaching the luckless children of a rich soap manufacturer to play Wagner on the piano, and had all agreed that the situation looked hopeless. Jack had been in the depths of despair because the tenor of the choir for which Margery played the organ had called three times that week, and, though I didn't believe she cared a ring for the tenor, I had never known naughty Margery to appear more willfully regardless of Jack's feelings. We had parted, therefore, gloomily enough, after a fruitless conference, and I had relieved my mind by being especially cross to Margery all day, though I must own she didn't seem to mind much. It was an awful day, raining cats and dogs, and in the afternoon I got tired of being cross all by myself, and proposed that we should shampoo our hair and dry it on the parlor radiator, the only one in the flat large enough for the purpose. Of course, Margery objected. Visitors might come, she said, and then who would let them in? I scouted the idea of visitors on such a day, unless, I observed with sarcasm, she was expecting the tenor again. She didn't notice this stab, so I proceeded to say that as the radiator was in the corner we could pull our big Japanese screen up in front of it, and, secure in our hiding place, yet our entire visiting acquaintance, including messenger boys and duns, knock at the door till they got tired, and then depart, blissfully unaware of our proximity. Accordingly it wasn't long before we were snugly ensconced on a pile of sofa pillows on the parlor floor, wrapped in our bath robes and with our wet locks streaming out behind us across the radiator, over which we had stretched a steamer rug. We were armed with a novel apiece, but soon got to talking girl fashion, and were deep in a discussion of Amos Judd, when there came a loud knock at the door. "Great Scott!" I exclaimed in a stage whisper, the rosy advantages of my plan suddenly fading in the cold light of reality. "There, I told you so!" cried Margery ungenerously, sitting up abruptly so that her hair fell all about her in a great, shining, coppery shower. "Sh-shut up!" I whispered, reaching out with an agitated stockinged toe for the bedroom slipper I had carelessly kicked off a moment before. Again the knock came, this time more imperative. "What in heaven's name shall we do?" gasped Margery. "Keep still, you chump," I said, sotto voce, too nervous to pick my words. Then the door handle turned and we heard Ned's voice saying: "There's nobody home. Let's come in and wait for them." "All right," was the reply in Jack's bass tone. "Maybe it's not the proper thing, but we might as well risk it." and we heard the door close as our visitors entered and took possession of our apartment. It was too ridiculous. I'd have had to laugh if our lives had been at stake, and in spite of the imminent danger of discovery in this mortifying plight I stuffed all of a sofa pillow that would go into my mouth and shook till my sides ached. It was the expression on Margery's face that recalled me to myself at last. Chancing to glance up from behind a corner of the cushion I was trying to swallow, I caught her listening with strained attention to something that was being said on the other side of the screen, with every bit of color gone out of her face, and a look in her eyes I'd never seen there before. "Yes," Jack was saying, "if they don't hurry I'll have to go without saying good by. My train leaves at 7, and I've lots to do." Ned lighted his pipe before he replied. Dear Ned, I believe he would smoke in heaven if Peter didn't take the precaution to search him before he let him in. "I guess it'll surprise them some," he remarked at last. "Especially when they hear you're never coming back." I nudged Margery violently at this, but she didn't look at me—the minx—and then Jack went on dolefully: "Oh, they won't care very much, I'm afraid." "Of course they will," protested Ned, puffing away. "And I will anyway. Must you go, old boy?" "Well, it's this way, Ned. As long as I hoped that Margery might care for me I wouldn't give in to my uncle's proposition that I should marry his ward, Miss Wilson, and become his heir, but now that I'm satisfied I have no chance with the girl I love, I might as well marry the other one and please the old man, I suppose. I'll be miserable anyway." And Jack heaved such a sigh that the big paper screen waved about till it threatened to come down about our heads. I gave a horrified look at Margery, but her hair had fallen over her face, and I could only see one little hand clinched fiercely as if she had a pain somewhere. I reached dumbly over and tried to take the little hand, but she shook me off, and so I fell to listening again. "Well, it's not so bad as it might be," Ned was saying encouragingly. "I hear Miss Wilson is a beauty." "She is," said Jack, with enthusiasm. "And then think of the money, my boy. Most any fellow would envy you." "I suppose so," said Jack, drearily. "But I must go. Time's up. Will you say good by to the girls for me, Ned? Tell Margery—" Here Jack choked and I was so busy catching a large, warm tear that was chasing toward the end of my nose that I forgot to look at Margery, when to my amazement a little figure in a gray bath robe, with a cloud of coppery hair flying after it, bounded right over me, and as the screen toppled over with a crash I heard Margery's voice cry: "Oh, no, Jack, you mustn't go. I—I love you, Jack." I had a confused vision of Jack seizing the little figure in his arms, and then I started to run—I don't look so pretty with my hair wet as Margery does. But somehow when I got to the door I met Ned, and as I looked up wrathfully something I saw in his eye made me stop short. "Ned Tucker," I exclaimed, "you knew we were there all the time." "Well," he said, not a whit ashamed, "if you will leave the ventilating shaft open—" "You wretch," I cried, and then something else struck me. "And the uncle," I gasped, "and the beautiful Miss Wilson—" "Are about as real," said Master Ned, "as civil service reform." - Edgar Temple Field in Chicago Times-Herald.