esumably
from the caverns of a matrimony-infested Hades. "It will be
simple--painfully simple. The ceremony can be performed this morning and
in New Jersey. We will leave at once and without notifying either your
friends or mine, on an extended wedding tour--I should say of six
months' duration at the least," Anthony went on brokenly, while Johnson
Boller gazed at him in pure fascination. "In a week or so we can write
everywhere, giving the impression that it has been an elopement, the
ceremony having been performed yesterday. Then----"

"Stop!" Mary cried. "Stop that--that planning!"

"Eh?"

The girl was sitting bolt upright, eyes snapping, and Anthony regarded
her in astonishment. Also, she thumped the table with her small clenched
fist as she looked straight at him and gasped:

"Why, I--I wouldn't marry you if you were ten times the last man in the
world!"

"But----"

"No!" Mary said quite wildly.

"There is not another thing to do," Anthony informed her, with a
forlorn, heart-broken smile. "Your good name----"

"You'll find some other way of preserving my good name!" Mary said
warmly. "I'm engaged now to the very finest man in the whole world!"

"You're engaged!" Anthony cried intelligently.

"Yes, and he's a sane man, too, and he doesn't cry over the prospect of
marrying me!" the young woman hurtled on. "He's a _real_ man, and if he
ever finds out that you made me stay here all last night, he'll ignore
the circumstances and shoot you just as sure as you're sitting there!"

She stopped, breathing hard, and shook her head at Anthony Fry, so that
the red-gold curls tumbled about quite riotously. Anthony, blinking,
said nothing at all, but his friend Johnson Boller took to muttering,
rather like a perturbed hen.

As a matter of fact, Boller was downright fond of Anthony, and the
prospect of having him slain in cold blood was very distressing. Turning
helpful for the first time, Johnson Boller was on the point of trying to
think up ways and means of getting Mary out--but Mary herself was
speaking again.

"And don't think that that ridiculous proposal lifts any responsibility
from your shoulders, either!" she said, energetically. "It doesn't!"

"I had not meant to imply that it did," Anthony said dully.

"You got me here and you've kept me here," said Mary, and it was plain
that her even temper had not yet returned. "You'll have to devise the
way to get me out of here and what to say when I do get home