kimono to sleep in. And after that we all three took a mustard foot-bath and some camphor sprinkled on sugar and went to bed.
Aggie wakened me at nine o'clock the next morning by hunting in my bureau for her second best teeth, and it was then that we found our lovers had gone. In the girl's room there was a letter of thanks. She said she did not wish to disturb us after that awful night, but that she could not sleep, and that she and Mr. Mansfield were going down to Telusah to be married.
Tish read the letter aloud and stared at us, while Paulina whined for her breakfast.
"Upon my soul," Tish gasped, when she could speak. "Instead of clapping him into jail, she's going to marry him!"
"Do you thuppoth he went to Telutha in that kimono?" Aggie said in a husky whisper. She had taken a terrible cold.
But Mr. Mansfield did not go to Telusah in Tish's kimono.
After all, the beginning of this story is also the end. For now you can understand why Tish dropped the bowl when the young man brought her kimono back from the Watermelon Camp and asked for Mr. Carleton's trousers!
I have told the story in defense of Tish and the rest of us. I wish to brand as false the story told by the man from the hotel who happened to be fishing for muskalunge early that morning. He said, you remember, that he saw. Miss Carberry in her green kimono leave our cottage just after dawn and go stealthily along the beach through the mist to the Watermelon Camp. When she got there, he said, to his horror he saw her strip off the green kimono and hang it to a tree. Just then the mist shut down and he saw nothing more.
In his anxiety for Miss Carberry's sanity he was on the point of landing to investigate, when he hooked the largest 'lunge of the season (registered weight at the hatcheries, thirty-seven pounds four ounces), and when he looked again at the shore all he saw was a red-haired man hurrying along the beach in a pair of corduroy trousers and a bathing-shirt!
Tish closed the incident with one comment.
"Young millionaire!" she snapped when she saw the newspapers. "Young scamp, I say, stealing poor Mr. Carleton's sweetheart and then his trousers. As for my green kimono, after all we did for him, he might at least have had the grace to roll it up and stick it imder a barrel. I shall bum it."
But she did not. Aggie saw it only the other day, put away in a lavender silk sachet, with a bundle of newspaper clippings, a half-eaten bath sponge, and a particular kind of bass hook, which we had found on the sitting-room floor.
THE END
Tish: The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions
Mind Over Motor
How Tish Broke the Law and Some Records
I
So many unkind things have been said of the affair at Morris Valley that I think it best to publish a straightforward account of everything. The ill nature of the cartoon, for instance, which showed Tish in a pair of khaki trousers on her back under a racing-car was quite uncalled for. Tish did not
