"I say, Snorky, where do you keep the Bible?"
Snorky's first thought was that Skippy must be the victim of a secret malady and ready to make his will. His next was even more alarming.
"You're not thinking of anything rash, are you, old horse?"
"What the Sam Blazes are you driving at?"
"Thought you were looking up the marriage service," said Snorky facetiously.
"Shucks, no. Nothing of the sort. I just, I just want to look up a reference."
"It's of a personal nature, very personal," said Skippy.
At the end of an hour's search Snorky finally produced a Bible from the cook and watched Skippy turn through the pages in a perplexed manner.
"I've watched that coot do some queer things," he thought, scratching his ear, "but I'll be jiggswiggered if I can figure out what he's up to now."
At the end of half an hour Skippy looked up nonplussed.
"What do you know about the Bible, anyhow?"
"Where do you get the ten commandments, anyhow?"
Snorky repeated the question, more and more perplexed.
"How about Solomon? He was wise to everything."
"Who was the guy who went up to Heaven? Perhaps he got 'em."
"Now what in the Sam Hill has Skippy to do with the ten commandments or the ten commandments with Skippy?" said Snorky, observing the extraordinary concentration on his chum's face as he considered them carefully one by one. "Perhaps the heat has hit him and he's going in for religion."
The explanation of Skippy's eccentric taste was a perfectly simple one. No sooner had he departed from the lovely presence of Miss Jennie Tupper with only the vaguest idea of what he had pledged himself not to do, but with the liveliest and most disturbing memory of the softest of hands, than he had bitterly repented the prodigal manner in which he had thrown away his opportunities.
"Why the deuce didn't I save something out," he said to himself angrily, with a sudden recollection of moonlight nights to come. "My aunt's cat's pants, but I certainly went to sleep."
From the parsonage to the Greens', from the soup to the watermelon, but one idea obsessed him: how was he to find something else to swear off? For instinct, which supplants reason in such sentimental voyages, warned him that to such a professional reformer as Miss Jennie Tupper his sole fascination lay in a lively display of original sin.