Early in the morning, too, I overheard a scrap of conversation between the policeman and our gentleman adventurer from South America.  Something had gone wrong with the telephone and Mr. Harbison was fussing over it with a screw driver and a pair of scissors—­all the tools he could find.  Flannigan was lifting rugs to shake them on the roof—­Bella’s order.

“Wash the table linen!” he was grumbling.  “I’ll do what I can that’s necessary.  Grub has to be cooked, and dishes has to be washed—­I’ll admit that.  If you’re particular, make up your bed every day; I don’t object.  But don’t tell me we have to use thirty-three table napkins a day.  What did folks do before napkins was invented?  Tell me that!”—­triumphantly.

“What’s the answer?” Mr. Harbison inquired absently, evidently with the screw driver in his mouth.

“Used their pocket handkerchiefs!  And if the worst comes to the worst, Mr. Harbison, these folks here can use their sleeves, for all I care—­not that the women has any sleeves to speak of.  Wash clothes I will not.”

“Well, don’t worry Mrs. Wilson about it,” the other voice said.  Flannigan straightened himself with a grunt.

“Mrs. Wilson!” he said.  “A lot she would worry.  She’s been a disappointment to me, Mr. Harbison, me thinking that now she’d come back to him, after leavin’ him the way she did, they’d be like two turtle doves.  Lord!  The cook next door—­”

But what the cook had told about Bella and Jimmy was not divulged, for the Harbison man caught him up with a jerk and sent Flannigan, grumbling, with his rugs to the roof.

It did not seem possible to carry on the deception much longer, but if things were bad now, what would they be when Aunt Selina learned she had been lied to, made ridiculous, generally deceived?  And how would I be able to live in the house with her when she did know?  Luckily, every one was so puzzled over the mystery in the house that numbers of little things that would have been absolutely damning were never noticed at all.  For instance, my asking Jimmy at luncheon that day if he took cream in his coffee!  And Max coming to the rescue by dropping his watch in his glass of water, and creating a diversion and giving everybody an opportunity to laugh by saying not to mind, it had been in soak before.

Just after luncheon Aunt Selina brought me some undergarments of Jim’s to be patched.  She explained at length that he had always worn out his undergarments, because he always squirmed around so when he was sitting.  And she showed me how to lay one of the garments over a pillow to get the patch in properly.

It was the most humiliating moment of my life, but there was no escape.  I took my sewing to the roof, while she went away to find something else for me to do when that was finished, and I sat with the thing on my knee and stared at it, while rebellious tears rolled down my cheeks.  The patch was not the shape of the hole at all, and every time I took a stitch I sewed it fast to the pillow beneath.  It was terrible.  Jim came up after a while and sat down across from me and watched, without saying anything.  I suppose what he felt would not have been proper to say to me.  We had both reached the point where adequate language failed us.  Finally he said: