n't you go
to him at once, and tell him the whole thing, and beg him, implore him,
to help us?"

Campbell: "Why, you just told me I mustn't!"

Mrs. Campbell: "You didn't expect me to say you might, did you? Oh, how
cruel!" She whirls out of the room, and Campbell stands in a daze, in
which he is finally aware of Mr. Arthur Welling, seen through the open
window, on the veranda without. Mr. Welling, with a terrified and
furtive air, seems to be fixed to the spot where he stands.

II

_MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL_

Campbell: "Why, Welling, what the devil are you doing there?"

Welling: "Trying to get away."

Campbell: "To get away? But you sha'n't, man! I won't let you. I was
just going to see you. How long have you been there?"

Welling: "I've just come."

Campbell: "What have you heard?"

Welling: "Nothing--nothing. I was knocking on the window-casing to make
_you_ hear, but you seemed preoccupied."

Campbell: "Preoccupied! convulsed! cataclysmed! Look here: we're in a
box, Welling. And you've got us into it." He pulls Welling's note out of
his pocket, where he has been keeping his hand on it, and pokes it at
him. "Is that yours?"

Welling, examining it with bewilderment mounting into anger: "It's mine;
yes. May I ask, Mr. Campbell, how you came to have this letter?"

Campbell: "May I ask, Mr. Welling, how you came to write such a letter
to my wife?"

Welling: "To your wife? To Mrs. Campbell? I never wrote any such letter
to her."

Campbell: "Then you addressed it to her."

Welling: "Impossible!"

Campbell: "Impossible? I think I can convince you, much as I regret to
do so." He makes search about Mrs. Campbell's letters on the table
first, and then on the writing-desk. "We have the envelope. It came
amongst a lot of letters, and there's no mistake about it." He continues
to toss the letters about, and then desists. "But no matter; I can't
find it; Amy's probably carried it off with her. There's no mistake
about it. I was going to have some fun with you about it, but now you
can have some fun with me. Whom did you send Mrs. Campbell's letter to?"

Welling: "Mrs. Campbell's letter?"

Campbell: "Oh, pshaw! your acceptance or refusal, or whatever it was, of
her garden fandango. You got an invitation?"

Welling: "Of course."

Campbell: "And you wrote to accept it or decline it at the same time
that you wrote this letter here to some one else. And you addressed two
envelopes before you put th