ss Lucy's brother. And they
are all three in there straightening themselves out and finding where
everybody gets off at, and why. One of these here serious times you read
about. And you and me are missing it all, like a couple of gumps. How
can we hear?"

Martha says she don't know.

"You THINK," I told her. "We've wasted five good minutes already. I've
GOT to hear the rest of it. Where would they be?"

Martha guesses they will all be in the sitting room, which has got the
best chairs in it.

"What is next to it? A back parlour, or a bedroom, or what?" I was
thinking of how I happened to overhear Perfessor Booth and his fambly
that-a-way.

Martha says they is nothing like that to be tried.

"Martha," I says, "this is serious. This here story they are thrashing
out in there is the only derned sure-enough romanceful story either
you or me is ever lible to run up against personal in all our lives. It
would of been a good deal nicer if they had ast us in to see the wind-up
of it. Fur, if it hadn't of been fur me, they never would of been
reunited and rejuvenated the way they be. But some people get stingy
streaks with their concerns. You think!"

Martha, she says: "Danny, it wouldn't be honourable to listen."

"Martha," I tells her, "after the way you and me went and jilted each
other, what kind of senses of honour have WE got to brag about?"

She remembers that the spare bedroom is right over the sitting room.
The house is heated with stoves in the winter time. There is a register
right through the floor of the spare bedroom and the ceiling of
the sitting room. Not the kind of a register that comes from a
twisted-around shaft in a house that uses furnace heat. But jest really
a hole in the floor, with a cast-iron grating, to let the heat from
the room below into the one above. She says she guesses two people that
wasn't so very honourable might sneak into the house the back way, and
up the back stairs, and into the spare bedroom, and lay down on their
stummicks on the floor, being careful to make no noise, and both see and
hear through that register. Which we done it.

CHAPTER XXIV

I could hear well enough, but at first I couldn't see any of them. But
I gathered that Miss Lucy was standing up whilst she was talking, and
moving around a bit now and then. I seen one of her sleeves, and then a
wisp of her hair. Which was aggervating, fur I wanted to know what she
was like. But her voice was so soft an