"Yes," he rambled on, "Delight can shut her mouth on occasions like as
if it was a scallop shell. The only trouble is she'd oughter close her
eyes too, for they talk 'most as well as her tongue does. Likely
you've noticed that," he added innocently.
"I--eh--"
"Fur's that goes, your own eyes do somethin' in the speakin' line,"
affirmed Willie, bending to fleck a bit of dust from the appliance
before them.
"What!" Robert Morton exclaimed with alarm.
The old inventor nodded gravely.
"Yes," continued he, "now I come to think of it, you've got among the
most speakin' eyes I ever see. They kinder bawl things right out."
"What--what--have they--" stammered Bob, crumpling weakly down upon the
rickety chair before the stove.
"Bawled? Oh, a lot of things," was the provokingly ambiguous retort.
His companion eyed him narrowly.
"I'm--I'm--in a horrible mess, Willie," he suddenly blurted out quite
irrelevently.
"I know it."
Robert Morton gasped, then lapsed into stunned silence.
"Without goin' into any details or discussin' any ladies we know, my
advice would be to make a clean breast of the whole thing," the little
old man announced, avoiding Robert Morton's eyes and blowing a ring of
smoke from his pipe impersonally toward the low ceiling.
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