Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/128

116 the scene before her. Meanwhile, from the parlour window, the old gentleman, in a vague alarm that would have been humorous if it hadn't been a bit pathetic, gazed at the vivid flamingo that had come to brood on his lawn, perhaps even to nest in his house.

"H'mmm!" he muttered to himself, "some of Phil's chickens come home to roost—I wonder!"

Nor was he borrowing one of Carlotta's figures, either, though you might have thought so, for she had the way of setting the most sedate to her own tricks,—their bodies to twitching and swaying, their tongues to queerest conversational turns.

Growing impatient, she returned to the hotel and tried the boothless telephone, to the delight of the lobby loungers, who had gotten past the salacity stage of their curiosity and were now merely enjoying the humour of the situation. As for her, she cared not that they heard. Those Huntingtons were going to get all the publicity they needed. Her charge and fee would come later.

"Hello, Phil dear, this is Carlotta"—then, hearing his voice, her own unconsciously softened, though it could never exactly achieve a pianissimo. "Ole guy's in the room," she muttered, as she heard the irrelevant answer:

"Yes, see that there's plenty of gasoline in the tank, and bring her around at six-thirty sharp."

At the other end of the wire, the elder Huntington's suspicions reared their ghastly heads once more. From where he sat he could hear the faint echo of a throaty contralto from the instrument, and it didn't sound at all like the gruff