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 collector of news. "I mean when'd you leave Ketlar? That is, if you left him. Did you? Say, what happened between him and you?"

"Nothing," said Joan Daisy.

"Oh, come along," persuaded Oliver. "You and his mother went off with him. He canned his mother downtown—we know that. He goes off with you, and the next thing we get a call from Waukegan that a justice of peace is pronouncing Fred Ketlar and somebody else man and wife. What went wrong with him and you? When did she cut in? You were the one doped to marry him."

So Joan Daisy learned that Ket was married, and she heard it with no sense of shock at all. Of course he would be married to-day. Her mind roved the gallery of girls in his room, wondering whom he sought after sending her home; or whom he had happened across or who had found him.

"Who is she?" Joan asked Oliver.

"Then you didn't know!"

"I don't."

"It's Lola Nesson; and they were married 'bout half an hour ago. They drove up to Waukegan and after the ceremony," continued Oliver, unconsciously quoting the phrase of news-writing, "they started back to Chicago. What you got to say?"

For a moment she could say nothing; she was wondering whether Ket had kept the suite, "the swellest in the shed," which he had engaged for him and herself and was taking Lola Nesson to it.

"Please don't say anything for me," begged Joan Daisy, out of her extensive, recent experience with reporters, "except 'I hope they'll be happy' or something like that."

"I'll fix up something good for you," promised Oliver, both the perfect reporter and the eager friend. "But,