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acted but still grimly firm, stood frowzy Widow Larken herself, drawn and held to the post of duty by this vast and unusual emergency. Not one room had Madam Larken saved for all these alien warblers, not one morsel of food had she loosed from her capacious kitchen; and yet not one member of the company had she permitted to stray outside her doors while Signorina Caravaggio and Signor Ricardo and the Herr Professor Fruehlingsvogel had gone out to secure an angel, two stout porters being kept at the front door to turn back the restless. If provision could be made to pay the bills of this caravan, the Widow Larken--who was shaped like a pillow with a string tied around it and wore a face like a huge, underdone apple dumpling--was too good a business woman to overlook that opportunity. Bobby took one sweeping glance at that advancing circle of one hundred and forty eyes and turned to Widow Larken. "I will be responsible for the hotel bills of these people until further notice," said he. The Widow Larken, looking intently at Bobby's scarf-pin, relented no whit in her uncompromising attitude. "And who might you be?" she demanded, with a calm brow and cold determination. "I am Robert J. Burnit," said Bobby. "I'll give you a written order if you like--or a check." The Widow Larken's uncompromising expression instantly melted, but she did not smile--she grinned. Bobby knew precisely the cause of that amused expression, but if he had needed an interpreter, he had one at his elbow in the person of Biff Bates, who looked up at him with a reflection of the same grin. "They're all next to you, Bobby," he observed. "The whole town knows that you're the real village goat." The Widow Larken did not answer Bobby directly. She called back to a blue-overall-clad porter at the end of the lobby: "Open the dining-room doors, Michael." Signorina Caravaggio immediately said a few guttural words in German to Professor Fruehlingsvogel, a few limpid words in Italian to Signor Ricardo a few crisp words in French to Madame Villenauve, a nervous but rather attractive little woman with piercing black eyes. The singers of other languages did not wait to be informed; they joined the general stampede toward the ravishing paradise of midday breakfast, and as the last of them vacated the lobby, the principals no whit behind the humble members of the chorus in crowding and jamming through that doorway, Bobby breathed a sigh of relief.
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