ried to feel if my part was right.

He _did_ hurry! By Jove, he was back almost immediately and looking a
bit rattled.

"Yes, sir!"--he coughed as I screwed my glass inquiringly--"I got there
just as the judge went into his room across the corridor, and Mr.
Billings opened the door the minute I said I was from you. I gave him
the package and the message and he took it over in a corner; and then in
about a minute I heard him chuck it somewhere and say some long word. He
came back to me, looking kinder irritated and with his eyes snapping."

"Oh!" I uttered nervously. "Er, what did he say, Jenkins?"

Jenkins sighed. "Oh, well, sir, nothing as you might say was anything,
_really_; he jerks out kinder crossly: 'Tell Mr. Lightnut, I say one
thing at a time, and give him this!'"

On the scrap of paper I clutched out of Jenkins' hand was a crazy scrawl
of just a half-dozen words:

_I'm a biped, not a centipede!_

I squinted through the dashed thing twice, but could make nothing of
it--I even tried it backward!

"Jove!" I muttered perplexedly. "It's rum, Jenkins!"

Jenkins' mouth tightened and relaxed. "H'm, what _I_ thought, sir," he
responded soberly. "The demon rum, sir!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

"IF EVER I FIND A MAN!"

"I trust you've not been getting into trouble, Mr. Lightnut!"

Her lovely eyes were dancing with mischief as they hung there below
mine--eyes, bluer than the Hudson at our feet; yet between the jolly
ripples that played across those pools of truth I could glimpse far down
into depths that were the most devilishly entrancing, darkly, deeply,
beautifully--oh, _you_ know!

Why, by Jove, I almost took a cropper right into them! Only caught just
in time, you know; straightened right on the verge, as it were--and came
up with a gasp, monocle dangling.

Had almost forgotten the dashed windows--and the two cats that might be
looking out!

I murmured some jolly apology, adding:

"Oh, yes--quite so; certainly! I _mean_--eh what?"

She was smiling, her rose-petal lip dragging through her teeth.

"The 'bobby,' you know, just now"--she nodded toward the
_porte-cochere_--"I was positive he had come to drag you away to your
loathsome dungeon. And when he retired, I was--oh, _so_ relieved!" And
she clasped her hands, her eyes lifting upward.

"Oh, I say now--were you, though?" I grinned delightedly and slipping to
a rustic chair beside her, looked her affectionately in the eye. For all
her air of c