"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 wear the khaki trousers; she merely took them along in case of emergency. Nor was it true that Tish took Aggie along as a mechanician and brutally pushed her off the car because she was not pumping enough oil. The fact was that Aggie sneezed on a curve and fell out of the car, and would no doubt have been killed had she not been thrown into a pile of sand.
It was in early September that Eliza Bailey, my cousin, decided to go to London, ostensibly for a rest, but really to get some cretonne at Liberty's. Eliza wrote me at Lake Penzance asking me to go to Morris Valley and look after Bettina.
I must confess that I was eager to do it. We three were very comfortable at Mat Cottage, "Mat" being the name Charlie Sands, Tish's nephew, had given it, being the initials of "Middle-Aged Trio." Not that I regard the late forties as middle-aged. But Tish, of course, is fifty. Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper, calls us either the "M.A.T." or the "B.A.'s," for "Beloved Aunts," although Aggie and I are not related to him.
Bettina's mother's note:—
Not that she will allow you to do it, or because she isn't entirely able to take care of herself; but because the people here are a talky lot. Bettina will probably look after you. She has come from college with a feeling that I am old and decrepit and must be cared for. She maddens me with pillows and cups of tea and woolen shawls. She thinks Morris Valley selfish and idle, and is disappointed in the church, preferring her Presbyterianism pure. She is desirous now of learning how to cook. If you decide to come I'll be grateful if you can keep her out of the