see you both downstairs?"

"Eh?" Anthony said.

"And Fry," the reptilian voice added, "you haven't told us what was in
the trunk you sent to Dalton's house, you know."

Anthony straightened up again. Two seconds were passed, and still he had
not the answer; three, and he was still silent; four, and he had not yet
spoken. And the playful breeze saved him all the trouble of speaking.
The latch of Anthony's bedroom door was not caught, and the breeze,
striking it squarely, sent it open suddenly and cleanly as if jerked
back by a wire!

And leaning forward in her chair, even now listening intently, Mary
Dalton was revealed!

Anthony Fry did not move; this was because he could not. But with a
single motion Theodore Dalton and Robert Vining, Johnson Boller and
Johnson Boller's wife, were on their feet and staring at her. With a
single plunge, Dalton and Vining went forward, and the former winning,
he snatched Mary to him and wrapped the great arms around her, mouthing
and mumbling and shouting all at once!

Still Anthony did not move. He had not moved when, through the swirl
that was before his eyes, Mary and her father came into the room. The
girl had disengaged herself and she was rather pale--ah, and she was
speaking to her father.

"Dad," she said very quietly, "have I ever told you a lie?"

"You'd be no daughter of mine if you had," Dalton said simply.

"Then what happened is just this: I wanted to go to that fight last
night and Bob wouldn't take me. He was so awfully uppish about it that I
decided to go myself; I like a good fight, you know. I didn't dare go as
a girl, so I put on Dicky's fishing suit--the old one--and sneaked out
the back door, after you thought I was in bed. Then I got a messenger
boy and managed to find a ticket for the fight. And I went," said Mary,
"and I happened to sit next to Mr. Fry."

"You went alone to a prize fight?" her father gasped.

"It was horribly tame," said Mary, "but some men started a fight behind
us, because Mr. Fry spoke to me, I think, and that wasn't tame at all.
For a minute it scared my wits out, because I thought we were all going
to be arrested. So when Mr. Fry and Mr. Boller decided to escape in a
taxicab, I was mighty glad to go with them. After that Mr. Fry--turned
queer," Mary dimpled. "He thought I was a boy and he wanted to offer me
the opportunity of a lifetime.

"I don't know just what it meant, but I was curious enough to come up
here and listen; an