“You forget,” I said, “that the idea only occurred to me after what you said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should have been ready earlier, and then where would your suspicions have been?”
“I am ashamed of having felt them,” she said, in her frank, hearty way. “I retract the word ‘trap,’ and I beg pardon for calling you ‘three cunning old gentlemen.’ But what am I to say to my aunt?”
She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.
“Say nothing,” I replied, “till you have heard the first story. Shut up the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you will open it again to write to your aunt.”
She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was not out of her mind yet.
“I rather fancy,” she said, slyly, “that the story will turn out to be the best of the
