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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: When a Man Marries
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: November 23, 2008 [EBook #1671]
+Release Date: March, 1999
+Last Updated: October 11, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN A MAN MARRIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Theresa Armao
+
+
+
+
+
+WHEN A MAN MARRIES
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+     I     At Least I Meant Well
+     II    The Way It Began
+     III   I Might Have Known It
+     IV    The Door Was Closed
+     V     From The Tree  Of  Love
+     VI    A Mighty Poor Joke
+     VII   We Make An Omelet
+     VIII  Correspondents’  Department
+     IX    Flannigan’s Find
+     X     On The Stairs
+     XI    I Make A Discovery
+     XII   The Roof Garden
+     XIII  He Does Not Deny It
+     XIV   Almost, But Not Quite
+     XV    Suspicion and Discord
+     XVI   I Face Flannigan
+     XVII  A Clash and A Kiss
+     XVIII It’s All My Fault
+     XIX   The Harbison Man
+     XX    Breaking Out In A New Place
+     XXI   A Bar of Soap
+     XXII  It Was A Delirium
+     XXIII Coming
+
+
+
+
+                    Needles and pins
+                    Needles and pins,
+                    When a man marries
+                    His trouble begins.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I. AT LEAST I MEANT WELL
+
+When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me.
+The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that
+I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all
+kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come
+and got in the papers and every one--but ourselves--laughed himself
+black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their
+one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a
+coal shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to tell
+it all in the order it happened.
+
+It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a
+foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it
+enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and
+a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap,
+which sounds incongruous, doesn’t it?
+
+It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was
+rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of
+his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face
+was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight
+cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging,
+and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing.
+And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his
+pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people
+buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his
+Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.
+
+The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition
+in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His
+art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he asked people to dinner,
+every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people
+chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy’s
+career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
+
+We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella,
+and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first
+winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait
+in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture,
+but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim
+asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest
+of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the
+Greuze women have long necks. I have not.
+
+After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the Adirondacks
+and when he came back he came at once to see me. He seemed to think I
+would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty
+minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no matter what she
+may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some time,
+and I was much calmer than he expected me to be.
+
+“If you mean,” I said finally in desperation, “that you and Bella
+are--are in love, why don’t you say so, Jim? I think you will find that
+I stand it wonderfully.”
+
+He brightened perceptibly.
+
+“I didn’t know how you would take it, Kit,” he said, “and I hope we will
+always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don’t care a whoop
+for me?”
+
+“Absolutely,” I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about
+Bella; it was very tiresome.
+
+Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was
+under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella
+and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning
+her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had
+learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I
+never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table
+again, and wished him happiness--which was sincere enough, but
+hopeless--and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time
+to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.
+
+We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the wedding
+he came around from his tailor’s, and we burned all his letters to me.
+He would read one and say: “Here’s a crackerjack, Kit,” and pass it
+to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim
+would say, “I am not worthy of her, Kit. I wonder if I can make her
+happy?” Or--“Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in
+London last winter?”
+
+Of course, one has to take the woman’s word about a thing like that, but
+the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.
+
+You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be
+reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is
+all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours’ eulogy of Bella. And
+just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard
+Jim begin to read one commencing “dearest Kit.” And the next day after
+the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!
+
+There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a
+frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in
+my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite
+forgave me. That was what made it so hard later--the situation would
+have been bad enough without that complication.
+
+They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months.
+And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it.
+Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would
+not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and
+WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored
+Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at
+the man who took her in, although it did not make him thin. Bella was
+flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people
+hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were
+mentioned.
+
+Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him--oh yes, she left him
+finally. She was intense enough about some things, and she said it got
+on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they asked for her husband.
+They would say, “Hello, Bella! How’s Bubbles? Still banting?” And Bella
+would try to laugh and say, “He swears his tailor says his waist is
+smaller, but if it is he must be growing hollow in the back.”
+
+But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary of
+Bella’s departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I say, I am
+very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and Bella had taken
+her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We
+heard afterward that they didn’t find an appendix, and that the one they
+showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she
+didn’t say. Whether the appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after
+box of flowers that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim
+who sent them.
+
+To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg’s to see the
+collection of antique furniture--mother was looking for a sideboard
+for father’s birthday in March--and I met Jimmy there, boring into a
+worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the end of a match, and
+looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me he came over.
+
+“I’m blue today, Kit,” he said, after we had shaken hands. “Come and
+help me dig bait, and then let’s go fishing. If there’s a worm in every
+hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish business. It’s a good
+business.”
+
+“Better than painting?” I asked. But he ignored my gibe and swelled up
+alarmingly in order to sigh.
+
+“This is the worst day of the year for me,” he affirmed, staring
+straight ahead, “and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over there.
+If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps
+by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the
+time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and
+then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!”
+
+“See here, Jim,” I said, leaning forward, “you’re not well. You can’t go
+through the rest of the day like this. I know what you’ll do; you’ll
+go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won’t eat any dinner.” He
+looked guilty.
+
+“Not Grieg,” he protested feebly. “Beethoven.”
+
+“You’re not going to do either,” I said with firmness. “You are going
+right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from
+Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for eight--that will be two
+tables of bridge. And you are not going to touch the pianola.”
+
+He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat, and
+stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair covered sofa.
+
+“I wish to thunder I had married you!” he said savagely. “You’re the
+finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw
+yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other--”
+
+“Nothing of the sort,” I said coldly, “and the fact that you didn’t
+marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow,
+I don’t like you when you speak like that.”
+
+Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
+
+“I haven’t been well,” he said heavily. “Don’t eat, don’t sleep.
+Wouldn’t you think I’d lose flesh? Kit”--he lowered his voice
+solemnly--“I have gained two pounds!”
+
+I said he didn’t look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and,
+because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he
+thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry
+Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering
+the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.
+
+That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of
+circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
+
+During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the
+dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn’t
+cook--when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And
+for Anne Brown to talk the way she did--saying I had always been crazy
+about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was
+coming--for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an
+aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried
+it along.
+
+
+
+Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN
+
+It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a
+success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in
+the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their chauffeur
+had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had telephoned all
+the police stations without success. They were afraid that there had
+been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie
+said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.
+
+Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from
+the other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a three-story
+affair, with a basement kitchen and servants’ dining room. Then, of
+course, there were cellars, as we found out afterward. On the first
+floor there was a large square hall, a formal reception room, behind it
+a big living room that was also a library, then a den, and back of all
+a Georgian dining room, with windows high above the ground. On the
+top floor Jim had a studio, like every other one I ever saw--perhaps a
+little mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there
+were cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields
+everywhere. It is strange, but when I think of that terrible house, I
+always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs, and stairs that
+would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper condition. I dream
+about those stairs, stretching above me in a Jacob’s ladder of shining
+wood and Persian carpets, going up, up, clear to the roof.
+
+The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they brought
+with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne said he would
+be great sport, because he was terribly serious, and had the most
+exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed extravagance, and built
+bridges or something. She had put away her cigarettes since he had been
+with them--he and Dallas had been college friends--and the only chance
+she had to smoke was when she was getting her hair done. And she had
+singed off quite a lot--a burnt offering, she called it.
+
+“My dear,” she said over the telephone, when I invited her, “I want you
+to know him. He’ll be crazy about you. That type of man, big and deadly
+earnest, always falls in love with your type of girl, the appealing
+sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up to now, to know what love
+is. But mind, don’t hurt him; he’s a dear boy. I’m half in love with him
+myself, and Dallas trots around at his heels like a poodle.”
+
+But all Anne’s geese are swans, so I thought little of the Harbison man
+except to hope that he played respectable bridge, and wouldn’t mark the
+cards with a steel spring under his finger nail, as one of her “finds”
+ had done.
+
+We all arrived about the same time, and Anne and I went upstairs
+together to take off our wraps in what had been Bella’s dressing room.
+It was Anne who noticed the violets.
+
+“Look at that!” she nudged me, when the maid was examining her wrap
+before she laid it down. “What did I tell you, Kit? He’s still quite mad
+about her.”
+
+Jim had painted Bella’s portrait while they were going up the Nile on
+their wedding trip. It looked quite like her, if you stood well off in
+the middle of the room and if the light came from the right. And just
+beneath it, in a silver vase, was a bunch of violets. It was really
+touching, and violets were fabulous. It made me want to cry, and
+to shake Bella soundly, and to go down and pat Jim on his generous
+shoulder, and tell him what a good fellow I thought him, and that
+Bella wasn’t worth the dust under his feet. I don’t know much about
+psychology, but it would be interesting to know just what effect those
+violets and my sympathy for Jim had in influencing my decision a half
+hour later. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that for some
+time after the odor of violets made me ill.
+
+We all met downstairs in the living room, quite informally, and Dallas
+was banging away at the pianola, tramping the pedals with the delicacy
+and feeling of a football center rush kicking a goal. Mr. Harbison was
+standing near the fire, a little away from the others, and he was all
+that Anne had said and more in appearance. He was tall--not too tall,
+and very straight. And after one got past the oddity of his face being
+bronze-colored above his white collar, and of his brown hair being
+sun-bleached on top until it was almost yellow, one realized that he was
+very handsome. He had what one might call a resolute nose and chin, and
+a pleasant, rather humorous, mouth. And he had blue eyes that were,
+at that moment, wandering with interest over the lot of us. Somebody
+shouted his name to me above the Tristan and Isolde music, and I held
+out my hand.
+
+Instantly I had the feeling one sometimes has, of having done just that
+same thing, with the same surroundings, in the same place, years before,
+I was looking up at him, and he was staring down at me and holding my
+hand. And then the music stopped and he was saying:
+
+“Where was it?”
+
+“Where was what?” I asked. The feeling was stronger than ever with his
+voice.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said, and let my hand drop. “Just for a second
+I had an idea that we had met before somewhere, a long time ago. I
+suppose--no, it couldn’t have happened, or I should remember.” He was
+smiling, half at himself.
+
+“No,” I smiled back at him. “It didn’t happen, I’m afraid--unless we
+dreamed it.”
+
+“We?”
+
+“I felt that way, too, for a moment.”
+
+“The Brushwood Boy!” he said with conviction. “Perhaps we will find a
+common dream life, where we knew each other. You remember the Brushwood
+Boy loved the girl for years before they really met.” But this was a
+little too rapid, even for me.
+
+“Nothing so sentimental, I’m afraid,” I retorted. “I have had exactly
+the same sensation sometimes when I have sneezed.”
+
+Betty Mercer captured him then and took him off to see Jim’s newest
+picture. Anne pounced on me at once.
+
+“Isn’t he delicious?” she demanded. “Did you ever see such shoulders?
+And such a nose? And he thinks we are parasites, cumberers of the earth,
+Heaven knows what. He says every woman ought to know how to earn her
+living, in case of necessity! I said I could make enough at bridge, and
+he thought I was joking! He’s a dear!” Anne was enthusiastic.
+
+I looked after him. Oddly enough the feeling that we had met before
+stuck to me. Which was ridiculous, of course, for we learned afterward
+that the nearest we ever came to meeting was that our mothers had been
+school friends! Just then I saw Jim beckoning to me crazily from the
+den. He looked quite yellow, and he had been running his fingers through
+his hair.
+
+“For Heaven’s sake, come in, Kit!” he said. “I need a cool head. Didn’t
+I tell you this is my calamity day?”
+
+“Cook gone?” I asked with interest. I was starving.
+
+He closed the door and took up a tragic attitude in front of the fire.
+“Did you ever hear of Aunt Selina?” he demanded.
+
+“I knew there WAS one,” I ventured, mindful of certain gossip as to
+whence Jimmy derived the Wilson income.
+
+Jim himself was too worried to be cautious. He waved a brazen hand at
+the snug room, at the Japanese prints on the walls, at the rugs, at the
+teakwood cabinets and the screen inlaid with pearl and ivory.
+
+“All this,” he said comprehensively, “every bite I eat, clothes I wear,
+drinks I drink--you needn’t look like that; I don’t drink so darned
+much--everything comes from Aunt Selina--buttons,” he finished with a
+groan.
+
+“Selina Buttons,” I said reflectively. “I don’t remember ever having
+known any one named Buttons, although I had a cat once--”
+
+“Damn the cat!” he said rudely. “Her name isn’t Buttons. Her name is
+Caruthers, my Aunt Selina Caruthers, and the money comes from buttons.”
+
+“Oh!” feebly.
+
+“It’s an old business,” he went on, with something of proprietary pride.
+“My grandfather founded it in 1775. Made buttons for the Continental
+Army.”
+
+“Oh, yes,” I said. “They melted the buttons to make bullets, didn’t
+they? Or they melted bullets to make buttons? Which was it?”
+
+But again he interrupted.
+
+“It’s like this,” he went on hurriedly. “Aunt Selina believes in me. She
+likes pictures, and she wanted me to paint, if I could. I’d have given
+up long ago--oh, I know what you think of my work--but for Aunt Selina.
+She has encouraged me, and she’s done more than that; she’s paid the
+bills.”
+
+“Dear Aunt Selina,” I breathed.
+
+“When I got married,” Jim persisted, “Aunt Selina doubled my allowance.
+I always expected to sell something, and begin to make money, and in
+the meantime what she advanced I considered as a loan.” He was eyeing me
+defiantly, but I was growing serious. It was evident from the preamble
+that something was coming.
+
+“To understand, Kit,” he went on dubiously, “you would have to know her.
+She won’t stand for divorce. She thinks it is a crime.”
+
+“What!” I sat up. I have always regarded divorce as essentially
+disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.
+
+“Oh, you know well enough what I’m driving at,” he burst out savagely.
+“She doesn’t know Bella has gone. She thinks I am living in a little
+domestic heaven, and--she is coming tonight to hear me flap my wings.”
+
+“Tonight!”
+
+I don’t think Jimmy had known that Dallas Brown had come in and was
+listening. I am sure I had not. Hearing his chuckle at the doorway
+brought us up with a jerk.
+
+“Where has Aunt Selina been for the last two or three years?” he asked
+easily.
+
+Jim turned, and his face brightened.
+
+“Europe. Look here, Dal, you’re a smart chap. She’ll only be here about
+four hours. Can’t you think of some way to get me out of this? I want to
+let her down easy, too. I’m mighty fond of Aunt Selina. Can’t we--can’t
+I say Bella has a headache?”
+
+“Rotten!” laconically.
+
+“Gone out of town?” Jim was desperate.
+
+“And you with a houseful of dinner guests! Try again, Jim.”
+
+“I have it,” Jim said suddenly. “Dallas, ask Anne if she won’t play
+hostess for tonight. Be Mrs. Wilson pro tem. Anne would love it. Aunt
+Selina never saw Bella. Then, afterward, next year, when I’m hung in
+the Academy and can stand on my feet”--(“Not if you’re hung,” Dallas
+interjected.)--“I’ll break the truth to her.”
+
+But Dallas was not enthusiastic.
+
+“Anne wouldn’t do at all,” he declared. “She’d be talking about the
+kids before she knew it, and patting me on the head.” He said it
+complacently; Anne flirts, but they are really devoted.
+
+“One of the Mercer girls?” I suggested, but Jimmy raised a horrified
+hand.
+
+“You don’t know Aunt Selina,” he protested. “I couldn’t offer Leila in
+the gown she’s got on, unless she wore a shawl, and Betty is too fair.”
+
+Anne came in just then, and the whole story had to be told again to her.
+She was ecstatic. She said it was good enough for a play, and that of
+course she would be Mrs. Jimmy for that length of time.
+
+“You know,” she finished, “if it were not for Dal, I would be Mrs. Jimmy
+for ANY length of time. I have been devoted to you for years, Billiken.”
+
+But Dallas refused peremptorily.
+
+“I’m not jealous,” he explained, straightening and throwing out his
+chest, “but--well, you don’t look the part, Anne. You’re--you are
+growing matronly, not but what you suit ME all right. And then I’d
+forget and call you ‘mammy,’ which would require explanation. I think
+it’s up to you, Kit.”
+
+“I shall do nothing of the sort!” I snapped. “It’s ridiculous!”
+
+“I dare you!” said Dallas.
+
+I refused. I stood like a rock while the storm surged around me and beat
+over me. I must say for Jim that he was merely pathetic. He said that my
+happiness was first; that he would not give me an uncomfortable minute
+for anything on earth; and that Bella had been perfectly right to
+leave him, because he was a sinking ship, and deserved to be turned out
+penniless into the world. After which mixed figure, he poured himself
+something to drink, and his hands were shaking.
+
+Dal and Anne stood on each side of him and patted him on the shoulders
+and glared across at me. I felt that if I was a rock, Jim’s ship had
+struck on me and was sinking, as he said, because of me. I began to
+crumble.
+
+“What--what time does she leave?” I asked, wavering.
+
+“Ten: nine; KIT, are you going to do it?”
+
+“No!” I gave a last clutch at my resolution. “People who do that kind
+of thing always get into trouble. She might miss her train. She’s almost
+certain to miss her train.”
+
+“You’re temporizing,” Dallas said sternly. “We won’t let her miss her
+train; you can be sure of that.”
+
+“Jim,” Anne broke in suddenly, “hasn’t she a picture of Bella? There’s
+not the faintest resemblance between Bella and Kit.”
+
+Jim became downcast again. “I sent her a miniature of Bella a couple of
+years ago,” he said despondently. “Did it myself.”
+
+But Dal said he remembered the miniature, and it looked more like me
+than Bella, anyhow. So we were just where we started. And down inside of
+me I had a premonition that I was going to do just what they wanted
+me to do, and get into all sorts of trouble, and not be thanked for it
+after all. Which was entirely correct. And then Leila Mercer came and
+banged at the door and said that dinner had been announced ages ago and
+that everybody was famishing. With the hurry and stress, and poor Jim’s
+distracted face, I weakened.
+
+“I feel like a cross between an idiot and a criminal,” I said shortly,
+“and I don’t know particularly why every one thinks I should be the
+victim for the sacrifice. But if you will promise to get her off early
+to her train, and if you will stand by me and not leave me alone with
+her, I--I might try it.”
+
+“Of course, we’ll stand by you!” they said in chorus. “We won’t let you
+stick!” And Dal said, “You’re the right sort of girl, Kit. And after
+it’s all over, you’ll realize that it’s the biggest kind of lark. Think
+how you are saving the old lady’s feeling! When you are an elderly
+person yourself, Kit, you will appreciate what you are doing tonight.”
+
+Yes, they said they would stand by me, and that I was a heroine and the
+only person there clever enough to act the part, and that they wouldn’t
+let me stick! I am not bitter now, but that is what they promised. Oh, I
+am not defending myself; I suppose I deserved everything that happened.
+But they told me that she would be there only between trains, and that
+she was deaf, and that I had an opportunity to save a fellow-being from
+ruin. So in the end I capitulated.
+
+When they opened the door into the living room, Max Reed had arrived and
+was helping to hide a decanter and glasses, and somebody said a cab was
+at the door.
+
+And that was the way it began.
+
+
+
+Chapter III. I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN IT
+
+The minute I had consented I regretted it. After all, what were Jimmy’s
+troubles to me? Why should I help him impose on an unsuspecting elderly
+woman? And it was only putting off discovery anyhow. Sooner or later,
+she would learn of the divorce, and--Just at that instant my eyes fell
+on Mr. Harbison--Tom Harbison, as Anne called him. He was looking on
+with an amused, half-puzzled smile, while people were rushing around
+hiding the roulette wheel and things of which Miss Caruthers might
+disapprove, and Betty Mercer was on her knees winding up a toy bear that
+Max had brought her. What would he think? It was evident that he thought
+badly of us already--that he was contemptuously amused, and then to have
+to ask him to lend himself to the deception!
+
+With a gasp I hurled myself after Jimmy, only to hear a strange voice in
+the hall and to know that I was too late. I was in for it, whatever was
+coming. It was Aunt Selina who was coming--along the hall, followed by
+Jim, who was mopping his face and trying not to notice the paralyzed
+silence in the library.
+
+Aunt Selina met me in the doorway. To my frantic eyes she seemed to
+tower above us by at least a foot, and beside her Jimmy was a red,
+perspiring cherub.
+
+“Here she is,” Jimmy said, from behind a temporary eclipse of black
+cloak and traveling bag. He was on top of the situation now, and he was
+mendaciously cheerful. He had NOT said, “Here is my wife.” That would
+have been a lie. No, Jimmy merely said, “Here she is.” If Aunt Selina
+chose to think me Bella, was it not her responsibility? And if I chose
+to accept the situation, was it not mine? Dallas Brown came forward
+gravely as Aunt Selina folded over and kissed me, and surreptitiously
+patted me with one hand while he held out the other to Miss Caruthers. I
+loathed him!
+
+“We always expect something unusual from James, Miss Caruthers,” he
+said, with his best manner, “but THIS--this is beyond our wildest
+dreams.”
+
+Well, it’s too awful to linger over. Anne took her upstairs and into
+Bella’s bedroom. It was a fancy of Jim’s to leave that room just as
+Bella had left it, dusty dance cards and favors hanging around and a
+pair of discarded slippers under the bed. I don’t think it had been
+swept since Bella left it. I believe in sentiment, but I like it brushed
+and dusted and the cobwebs off of it, and when Aunt Selina put down her
+bonnet, it stirred up a gray-white cloud that made her cough. She did
+not say anything, but she looked around the room grimly, and I saw her
+run her finger over the back of a chair before she let Hannah, the maid,
+put her cloak on it.
+
+Anne looked frightened. She ran into Bella’s bath and wet the end of a
+towel and when Hannah was changing Aunt Selina’s collar--her concession
+to evening dress--Anne wiped off the obvious places on the furniture.
+She did it stealthily, but Aunt Selina saw her in the glass.
+
+“What’s that young woman’s name?” she asked me sharply, when Anne had
+taken the towel out to hide it.
+
+“Anne Brown, Mrs. Dallas Brown,” I replied meekly. Every one replied
+meekly to Aunt Selina.
+
+“Does she live here?”
+
+“Oh, no,” I said airily. “They are here to dinner, she and her husband.
+They are old friends of Jim’s--and mine.”
+
+“Seems to have a good eye for dirt,” said Aunt Selina and went on
+fastening her brooch. When she was finally ready, she took a bead purse
+from somewhere about her waist and took out a half dollar. She held it
+up before Hannah’s eyes.
+
+“Tomorrow morning,” she said sternly, “You take off that white cap
+and that fol-de-rol apron and that black henrietta cloth, and put on
+a calico wrapper. And when you’ve got this room aired and swept, Mrs.
+Wilson will give you this.”
+
+Hannah took two steps back and caught hold of a chair; she stared
+helplessly from Aunt Selina to the half dollar, and then at me. Anne was
+trying not to catch my eye.
+
+“And another thing,” Aunt Selina said, from the head of the stairs, “I
+sent those towels over from Ireland. Tell her to wash and bleach the one
+Mrs. What’s-her-name Brown used as a duster.”
+
+Anne was quite crushed as we went down the stairs. I turned once,
+half-way down, and her face was a curious mixture of guilt and hopeless
+wrath. Over her shoulder, I could see Hannah, wide-eyed and puzzled,
+staring after us.
+
+Jim presented everybody, and then he went into the den and closed the
+door and we heard him unlock the cellarette. Aunt Selina looked at
+Leila’s bare shoulders and said she guessed she didn’t take cold
+easily, and conversation rather languished. Max Reed was looking like a
+thundercloud, and he came over to me with a lowering expression that I
+had learned to dread in him.
+
+“What fool nonsense is this?” he demanded. “What in the world possessed
+you, Kit, to put yourself in such an equivocal position? Unless”--he
+stopped and turned a little white--“unless you are going to marry Jim.”
+
+I am sorry for Max. He is such a nice boy, and good looking, too, if
+only he were not so fierce, and did not want to make love to me. No
+matter what I do, Max always disapproves of it. I have always had a
+deeply rooted conviction that if I should ever in a weak moment marry
+Max, he would disapprove of that, too, before I had done it very long.
+
+“Are you?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes--a sign of unusually bad
+humor.
+
+“Am I what?”
+
+“Going to marry him?”
+
+“If you mean Jim,” I said with dignity, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.
+Besides, he hasn’t asked me.”
+
+Aunt Selina had been talking Woman’s Suffrage in front of the fireplace,
+but now she turned to me.
+
+“Is this the vase Cousin Jane Whitcomb sent you as a wedding present?”
+ she demanded, indicating a hideous urn-shaped affair on the mantel. It
+came to me as an inspiration that Jim had once said it was an ancestral
+urn, so I said without hesitation that it was. And because there was a
+pause and every one was looking at us, I added that it was a beautiful
+thing.
+
+Aunt Selina sniffed.
+
+“Hideous!” she said. “It looks like Cousin Jane, shape and coloring.”
+
+Then she looked at it more closely, pounced on it, turned it upside down
+and shook it. A card fell out, which Dallas picked up and gave her with
+a bow. Jim had come out of the den and was dancing wildly around and
+beckoning to me. By the time I had made out that that was NOT the vase
+Cousin Jane had sent us as a wedding present, Aunt Selina had examined
+the card. Then she glared across at me and, stooping, put the card in
+the fire. I did not understand at all, but I knew I had in some way done
+the unforgivable thing. Later, Dal told me it was HER card, and that
+she had sent the vase to Jim at Christmas, with a generous check inside.
+When she straightened from the fireplace, it was to a new theme, which
+she attacked with her usual vigor. The vase incident was over, but she
+never forgot it. She proved that she never did when she sent me two
+urn-shaped vases with Paul and Virginia on them, when I--that is, later
+on.
+
+“The Cause in England has made great strides,” she announced from the
+fireplace. “Soon the hand that rocks the cradle will be the hand that
+actually rules the world.” Here she looked at me.
+
+“I’m not up on such things,” Max said blandly, having recovered some of
+his good humor, “but--isn’t it usually a foot that rocks the cradle?”
+
+Aunt Selina turned on him and Mr. Harbison, who were standing together,
+with a snort.
+
+“What have you, or YOU, ever done for the independence of woman?” she
+demanded.
+
+Mr. Harbison smiled. He had been looking rather grave until then. “We
+have at least remained unmarried,” he retorted. And then dinner was
+again announced.
+
+He was to take me out, and he came across the room to where I sat
+collapsed in a chair, and bent over me.
+
+“Do you know,” he said, looking down at me with his clear, disconcerting
+gaze, “do you know that I have just grasped the situation? There was
+such a noise that I did not hear your name, and I am only realizing now
+that you are my hostess! I don’t know why I got the impression that this
+was a bachelor establishment, but I did. Odd, wasn’t it?”
+
+I positively couldn’t look away from him. My features seemed frozen, and
+my eyes were glued to his. As for telling him the truth--well, my
+tongue refused to move. I intended to tell him during dinner if I had
+an opportunity; I honestly did. But the more I looked at him and saw
+how candid his eyes were, and how stern his mouth might be, the more I
+shivered at the plunge. And, of course, as everybody knows now, I didn’t
+tell him at all. And every moment I expected that awful old woman to
+ask me what I paid my cook, and when I had changed the color of my
+hair--Bella’s being black.
+
+Dinner was a half hour late when we finally went out, Jimmy leading off
+with Aunt Selina, and I, as hostess, trailing behind the procession with
+Mr. Harbison. Dallas took in the two Mercer girls, for we were one man
+short, and Max took Anne. Leila Mercer was so excited that she wriggled,
+and as for me, the candles and the orchids--everything--danced around
+in a circle, and I just seemed to catch the back of my chair as it flew
+past. Jim had ordered away the wines and brought out some weak and cheap
+Chianti. Dallas looked gloomy at the change, but Jim explained in
+an undertone that Aunt Selina didn’t approve of expensive vintages.
+Naturally, the meal was glum enough.
+
+Aunt Selina had had her dinner on the train, so she spent her time in
+asking me questions the length of the table, and in getting acquainted
+with me. She had brought a bottle of some sort of medicine downstairs
+with her, and she took a claret-glassful, while she talked. The stuff
+was called Pomona; shall I ever forget it?
+
+It was Mr. Harbison who first noticed Takahiro. Jimmy’s Jap had been the
+only thing in the menage that Bella declared she had hated to leave.
+But he was doing the strangest things: his little black eyes shifted
+nervously, and he looked queer.
+
+“What’s wrong with him?” Mr. Harbison asked me finally, when he saw that
+I noticed. “Is he ill?”
+
+Then Aunt Selina’s voice from the other end of the table:
+
+“Bella,” she called, in a high shrill tone, “do you let James eat
+cucumbers?”
+
+“I think he must be,” I said hurriedly aside to Mr. Harbison. “See how
+his hands shake!” But Selina would not be ignored.
+
+“Cucumbers and strawberries,” she repeated impressively. “I was
+saying, Bella, that cucumbers have always given James the most fearful
+indigestion. And yet I see you serve them at your table. Do you remember
+what I wrote you to give him when he has his dreadful spells?”
+
+I was quite speechless; every one was looking, and no one could help. It
+was clear Jim was racking his brain, and we sat staring desperately at
+each other across the candles. Everything I had ever known faded from
+me, eight pairs of eyes bored into me, Mr. Harbison’s politely amused.
+
+“I don’t remember,” I said at last. “Really, I don’t believe--” Aunt
+Selina smiled in a superior way.
+
+“Now, don’t you recall it?” she insisted. “I said: ‘Baking soda in water
+taken internally for cucumbers; baking soda and water externally, rubbed
+on, when he gets that dreadful, itching strawberry rash.’”
+
+I believe the dinner went on. Somebody asked Aunt Selina how much
+over-charge she had paid in foreign hotels, and after that she was as
+harmless as a dove.
+
+Then half way through the dinner we heard a crash in Takahiro’s
+pantry, and when he did not appear again, Jim got up and went out to
+investigate. He was gone quite a little while, and when he came back he
+looked worried.
+
+“Sick,” he replied to our inquiring glances. “One of the maids will come
+in. They have sent for a doctor.”
+
+Aunt Selina was for going out at once and “fixing him up,” as she put
+it, but Dallas gently interfered.
+
+“I wouldn’t, Miss Caruthers,” he said, in the deferential manner he had
+adopted toward her. “You don’t know what it may be. He’s been looking
+spotty all evening.”
+
+“It might be scarlet fever,” Max broke in cheerfully. “I say, scarlet
+fever on a Mongolian--what color would he be, Jimmy? What do yellow and
+red make? Green?”
+
+“Orange,” Jim said shortly. “I wish you people would remember that we
+are trying to eat.”
+
+The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr.
+Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering, no
+doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition. Ages afterward
+I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that night, and that he
+supposed from the way I glared across the table, that I had quarreled
+with my husband!
+
+“I am afraid you are not well,” he said at last, noticing my food
+untouched on my plate. “We should not have come, any of us.”
+
+“I am perfectly well,” I replied feverishly. “I am never ill. I--I ate a
+late luncheon.”
+
+He glanced at me keenly. “Don’t let them stay and play bridge tonight,”
+ he urged. “Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not? And you are
+really fagged. You look it.”
+
+“I think it is only ill humor,” I said, looking directly at him. “I am
+angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly.”
+
+Max would have said “Impossible,” or something else trite. The Harbison
+man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.
+
+“Is it too late to undo it?” he asked.
+
+And then and there I determined that he should never know the truth. He
+could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the
+Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always
+as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be
+stout--the artist, not I--and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made
+buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of
+me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man’s
+wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came
+along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to
+carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and
+matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a
+hands-off-she-is-my-host’s-wife attitude at last.
+
+“It can never be undone,” I said soberly.
+
+Well, that’s the picture as nearly as I can draw it: a round table
+with a low centerpiece of orchids in lavenders and pink, old silver
+candlesticks with filigree shades against the somber wainscoting; nine
+people, two of them unhappy--Jim and I; one of them complacent--Aunt
+Selina; one puzzled--Mr. Harbison; and the rest hysterically mirthful.
+Add one sick Japanese butler and grind in the mills of the gods.
+
+Every one promptly forgot Takahiro in the excitement of the game we were
+all playing. Finally, however, Aunt Selina, who seemed to have Takahiro
+on her mind, looked up from her plate.
+
+“That Jap was speckled,” she asserted. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s
+measles. Has he been sniffling, James?”
+
+“Has he been sniffling?” Jim threw across at me.
+
+“I hadn’t noticed it,” I said meekly, while the others choked.
+
+Max came to the rescue. “She refused to eat it,” he explained,
+distinctly and to everybody, apropos absolutely of nothing. “It said on
+the box, ‘ready cooked and predigested.’ She declared she didn’t care who
+cooked it, but she wanted to know who predigested it.”
+
+As every one wanted to laugh, every one did it then, and under cover
+of the noise I caught Anne’s eye, and we left the dining room. The men
+stayed, and by the very firmness with which the door closed behind us, I
+knew that Dallas and Max were bringing out the bottles that Takahiro had
+hidden. I was seething. When Aunt Selina indicated a desire to go over
+the house (it was natural that she should want to; it was her house, in
+a way) I excused myself for a minute and flew back to the dining room.
+
+It was as I had expected. Jim hadn’t cheered perceptibly, and the
+rest were patting him on the back, and pouring things out for him, and
+saying, “Poor old Jim” in the most maddening way. And the Harbison man
+was looking more and more puzzled, and not at all hilarious.
+
+I descended on them like a thunderbolt.
+
+“That’s it,” I cried shrewishly, with my back against the door. “Leave
+her to me, all of you, and pat each other on the back, and say it’s gone
+splendidly! Oh, I know you, every one!” Mr. Harbison got up and pulled
+out a chair, but I couldn’t sit; I folded my arms on the back. “After a
+while, I suppose, you’ll slip upstairs, the four of you, and have your
+game.” They looked guilty. “But I will block that right now. I am going
+to stay--here. If Aunt Selina wants me, she can find me--here!”
+
+The first indication those men had that Mr. Harbison didn’t know the
+state of affairs was when he turned and faced them.
+
+“Mrs. Wilson is quite right,” he said gravely. “We’re a selfish lot. If
+Miss Caruthers is a responsibility, let us share her.”
+
+“To arms!” Jim said, with an affectation of lightness, as they put their
+glasses down, and threw open the door. Dal’s retort, “Whose?” was
+lost in the confusion, and we went into the library. On the way Dallas
+managed to speak to me.
+
+“If Harbison doesn’t know, don’t tell him,” he said in an undertone.
+“He’s a queer duck, in some ways; he mightn’t think it funny.”
+
+“Funny,” I choked. “It’s the least funny thing I ever experienced.
+Deceiving that Harbison man isn’t so bad--he thinks me crazy, anyhow.
+He’s been staring his eyes out at me--”
+
+“I don’t wonder. You’re really lovely tonight, Kit, and you look like a
+vixen.”
+
+“But to deceive that harmless old lady--well, thank goodness, it’s nine,
+and she leaves in an hour or so.”
+
+But she didn’t and that’s the story.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. THE DOOR WAS CLOSED
+
+It was infuriating to see how much enjoyment every one but Jim and
+myself got out of the situation. They howled with mirth over the
+feeblest jokes, and when Max told a story without any point whatever,
+they all had hysteria. Immediately after dinner Aunt Selina had begun
+on the family connection again, and after two bad breaks on my part, Jim
+offered to show her the house. The Mercer girls trailed along, unwilling
+to lose any of the possibilities. They said afterward that it was
+terrible: she went into all the closets, and ran her hand over the tops
+of doors and kept getting grimmer and grimmer. In the studio they came
+across a life study Jim was doing and she shut her eyes and made the
+girls go out while he covered it with a drapery. Lollie! Who did the
+Bacchante dance at three benefits last winter and was learning a new one
+called “Eve”!
+
+When they heard Aunt Selina on the second floor, Anne, Dal and Max
+sneaked up to the studio for cigarettes, which left Mr. Harbison to me.
+I was in the den, sitting in a low chair by the wood fire when he came
+in. He hesitated in the doorway.
+
+“Would you prefer being alone, or may I come in?” he asked. “Don’t mind
+being frank. I know you are tired.”
+
+“I have a headache, and I am sulking,” I said unpleasantly, “but at
+least I am not actively venomous. Come in.”
+
+So he came in and sat down across the hearth from me, and neither of us
+said anything. The firelight flickered over the room, bringing out the
+faded hues of the old Japanese prints on the walls, gleaming in the
+mother-of-pearl eyes of the dragon on the screen, setting a grotesque
+god on a cabinet to nodding. And it threw into relief the strong profile
+of the man across from me, as he stared at the fire.
+
+“I am afraid I am not very interesting,” I said at last, when he
+showed no sign of breaking the silence. “The--the illness of the butler
+and--Miss Caruthers’ arrival, have been upsetting.”
+
+He suddenly roused with a start from a brown reverie.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I--oh, of course not! I was wondering
+if I--if you were offended at what I said earlier in the evening;
+the--Brushwood Boy, you know, and all that.”
+
+“Offended?” I repeated, puzzled.
+
+“You see, I have been living out of the world so long, and never seeing
+any women but Indian squaws”--so there were no Spanish girls!--“that I’m
+afraid I say what comes into my mind without circumlocution. And then--I
+did not know you were married.”
+
+“No, oh, no,” I said hastily. “But, of course, the more a woman is
+married--I mean, you can not say too many nice things to married women.
+They--need them, you know.”
+
+I had floundered miserably, with his eyes on me, and I half expected him
+to be shocked, or to say that married women should be satisfied with the
+nice things their husbands say to them. But he merely remarked apropos
+of nothing, or following a line of thought he had not voiced, that it
+was trite but true that a good many men owed their success in life to
+their wives.
+
+“And a good many owe their wives to their success in life,” I retorted
+cynically. At which he stared at me again.
+
+It was then that the real complexity of the situation began to develop.
+Some one had rung the bell and been admitted to the library and a maid
+came to the door of the den. When she saw us she stopped uncertainly.
+Even then it struck me that she looked odd, and she was not in uniform.
+However, I was not informed at that time about bachelor establishments,
+and the first thing she said, when she had asked to speak to me in the
+hall, knocked her and her clothes clear out of my head. Evidently she
+knew me.
+
+“Miss McNair,” she said in a low tone. “There is a lady in the drawing
+room, a veiled person, and she is asking for Mr. Wilson.”
+
+“Can you not find him?” I asked. “He is in the house, probably in the
+studio.”
+
+The girl hesitated.
+
+“Excuse me, miss, but Miss Caruthers--”
+
+Then I saw the situation.
+
+“Never mind,” I said. “Close the door into the drawing room, and I will
+tell Mr. Wilson.”
+
+But as the girl turned toward the doorway, the person in question
+appeared in it, and raised her veil. I was perfectly paralyzed. It was
+Bella! Bella in a fur coat and a veil, with the most tragic eyes I ever
+saw and entirely white except for a dab of rouge in the middle of each
+cheek. We stared at each other without speech. The maid turned and went
+down the hall, and with that Bella came over to me and clutched me by
+the arm.
+
+“Who was being carried out into that ambulance?” she demanded, glaring
+at me with the most awful intensity.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know, Bella,” I said, wriggling away from her fingers.
+“What in the world are you doing here? I thought you were in Europe.”
+
+“You are hiding something from me!” she accused. “It is Jim! I see it in
+your face.”
+
+“Well, it isn’t,” I snapped. “It seems to me, really, Bella, that you
+and Jim ought to be able to manage your own affairs, without dragging me
+in.” It was not pleasant, but if she was suffering, so was I. “Jim is as
+well as he ever was. He’s upstairs somewhere. I’ll send for him.”
+
+She gripped me again, and held on while her color came back.
+
+“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” she said, and she had quite got hold of
+herself again. “I do not want to see him: I hope you don’t think, Kit,
+that I came here to see James Wilson. Why, I have forgotten that there
+IS such a person, and you know it.”
+
+Somebody upstairs laughed, and I was growing nervous. What if Aunt
+Selina should come down, or Mr. Harbison come out of the den?
+
+“Why DID you come, then, Bella?” I inquired. “He may come in.”
+
+“I was passing in the motor,” she said, and I honestly think she hoped I
+would believe her, “and I saw that am--” She stopped and began again.
+“I thought Jim was out of town, and I came to see Takahiro,” she said
+brazenly. “He was devoted to me, and Evans is going to leave. I’ll tell
+you what to do, Kit. I’ll go back to the dining room, and you send Taka
+there. If any one comes, I can slip into the pantry.”
+
+“It’s immoral,” I protested. “It’s immoral to steal your--”
+
+“My own butler!” she broke in impatiently. “You’re not usually so
+scrupulous, Kit. Hurry! I hear that hateful Anne Brown.”
+
+So we slid back along the hall, and I rang for Takahiro. But no one
+came.
+
+“I think I ought to tell you, Bella,” I said as we waited, and Bella was
+staring around the room--“I think you ought to know that Miss Caruthers
+is here.”
+
+Bella shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Well, thank goodness,” she said, “I don’t have to see her. The only
+pleasant thing I remember about my year of married life is that I did
+NOT meet Aunt Selina.”
+
+I rang again, but still there was no answer. And then it occurred to
+me that the stillness below stairs was almost oppressive. Bella was
+noticing things, too, for she began to fasten her veil again with a
+malicious little smile.
+
+“One of the things I remember my late husband saying,” she observed,
+“was that HE could manage this house, and had done it for years, with
+flawless service. Stand on the bell, Kit.”
+
+I did. We stood there, with the table, just as it had been left, between
+us, and waited for a response. Bella was growing impatient. She raised
+her eyebrows (she is very handsome, Bella is) and flung out her chin as
+if she had begun to enjoy the horrible situation.
+
+I thought I heard a rattle of silver from the pantry just then, and I
+hurried to the door in a rage. But the pantry was empty of servants and
+full of dishes, and all the lights were out but one, which was burning
+dimly. I could have sworn that I saw one of the servants duck into the
+stairway to the basement, but when I got there the stairs were empty,
+and something was burning in the kitchen below.
+
+Bella had followed me and was peering over my shoulder curiously.
+
+“There isn’t a servant in the house,” she said triumphantly. And when we
+went down to the kitchen, she seemed to be right. It was in disgraceful
+order, and one of the bottles of wine that had ben banished from the
+dining room sat half empty on the floor.
+
+“Drunk!” Bella said with conviction. But I didn’t think so. There had
+not been time enough, for one thing. Suddenly I remembered the ambulance
+that had been the cause of Bella’s appearance--for no one could believe
+her silly story about Takahiro. I didn’t wait to voice my suspicion to
+her; I simply left her there, staring helplessly at the confusion, and
+ran upstairs again: through the dining room, past Jimmy and Aunt Selina,
+past Leila Mercer and Max, who were flirting on the stairs, up, up to
+the servants’ bedrooms, and there my suspicions were verified. There was
+every evidence of a hasty flight; in three bedrooms five trunks stood
+locked and ominous, and the closets yawned with open doors, empty. Bella
+had been right; there was not a servant in the house.
+
+As I emerged from the untidy emptiness of the servants’ wing, I met Mr.
+Harbison coming out of the studio.
+
+“I wish you would let me do some of this running about for you, Mrs.
+Wilson,” he said gravely. “You are not well, and I can’t think of
+anything worse for a headache. Has the butler’s illness clogged the
+household machinery?”
+
+“Worse,” I replied, trying not to breathe in gasps. “I wouldn’t be
+running around--like this--but there is not a servant in the house! They
+have gone, the entire lot.”
+
+“That’s odd,” he said slowly. “Gone! Are you sure?”
+
+In reply I pointed to the servants’ wing. “Trunks packed,” I said
+tragically, “rooms empty, kitchen and pantries, full of dishes. Did you
+ever hear of anything like it?”
+
+“Never,” he asserted. “It makes me suspect--” What he suspected he did
+not say; instead he turned on his heel, without a word of explanation,
+and ran down the stairs. I stood staring after him, wondering if every
+one in the place had gone crazy. Then I heard Betty Mercer scream and
+the rest talking loud and laughing, and Mr. Harbison came up the stairs
+again two at a time.
+
+“How long has that Jap been ailing, Mrs. Wilson?” he asked.
+
+“I--I don’t know,” I replied helplessly. “What is the trouble, anyhow?”
+
+“I think he probably has something contagious,” he said, “and it
+has scared the servants away. As Mr. Brown said, he looked spotty. I
+suggested to your husband that it might be as well to get the house
+emptied--in case we are correct.”
+
+“Oh, yes, by all means,” I said eagerly. I couldn’t get away too soon.
+“I’ll go and get my--” Then I stopped. Why, the man wouldn’t expect me
+to leave; I would have to play out the wretched farce to the end!
+
+“I’ll go down and see them off,” I finished lamely, and we went together
+down the stairs.
+
+Just for the moment I forgot Bella altogether. I found Aunt Selina
+bonneted and cloaked, taking a stirrup cup of Pomona for her nerves,
+and the rest throwing on their wraps in a hurry. Downstairs Max was
+telephoning for his car, which wasn’t due for an hour, and Jim was
+walking up and down, swearing under his breath. With the prospect of
+getting rid of them all, and, of going home comfortably to try to forget
+the whole wretched affair, I cheered up quite a lot. I even played up my
+part of hostess, and Dallas told me, aside, that I was a brick.
+
+Just then Jim threw open the front door.
+
+There was a man on the top step, with his mouth full of tacks, and he
+was nailing something to the door, just below Jim’s Florentine bronze
+knocker, and standing back with his head on one side to see if it was
+straight.
+
+“What are you doing?” Jim demanded fiercely, but the man only drove
+another tack. It was Mr. Harbison who stepped outside and read the card.
+
+It said “Smallpox.”
+
+“Smallpox,” Mr. Harbison read, as if he couldn’t believe it. Then he
+turned to us, huddled in the hall.
+
+“It seems it wasn’t measles, after all,” he said cheerfully. “I move we
+get into Mr. Reed’s automobile out there, and have a vaccination party.
+I suppose even you blase society folk have not exhausted that kind of
+diversion.”
+
+But the man on the step spat his tacks in his hand and spoke for the
+first time.
+
+“No, you don’t,” he said. “Not on your life. Just step back, please, and
+close the door. This house is quarantined.”
+
+
+
+Chapter V. FROM THE TREE OF LOVE
+
+There is hardly any use trying to describe what followed. Anne Brown
+began to cry, and talk about the children. (She went to Europe once and
+stayed until they all got over the whooping cough.) And Dallas said he
+had a pull, because his mill controlled I forget how many votes, and the
+thing to do was to be quiet and comfortable and we would get out in
+the morning. Max took it as a huge joke, and somebody found him at
+the telephone, calling up his club. The Mercer girls were hysterically
+giggling, and Aunt Selina sat on a stiff-backed chair and took aromatic
+spirits of ammonia. As for Jim, he had collapsed on the lowest step of
+the stairs, and sat there with his head in his hands. When he did look
+up, he didn’t dare to look at me.
+
+The Harbison man was arguing with the impassive individual on the top
+step outside, and I saw him get out his pocketbook and offer a crisp
+bundle of bills. But the man from the board of health only smiled and
+tacked at his offensive sign. After a while Mr. Harbison came in and
+closed the door, and we stared at one another.
+
+“I know what I’m going to do,” I said, swallowing a lump in my throat.
+“I’m going to get out through a basement window at the back. I’m going
+home.”
+
+“Home!” Aunt Selina gasped, jumping up and almost dropping her ammonia
+bottle. “My dear Bella! Home?”
+
+Jimmy groaned at the foot of the stairs, but Anne Brown was getting over
+her tears and now she turned on me in a temper.
+
+“It’s all your fault,” she said. “I was going to stay at home and get a
+little sleep--”
+
+“Well, you can sleep now,” Dallas broke in. “There’ll be nothing to do
+but sleep.”
+
+“I think you haven’t grasped the situation, Dal,” I said icily. “There
+will be plenty to do. There isn’t a servant in the house!”
+
+“No servants!” everybody cried at once. The Mercer girls stopped
+giggling.
+
+“Holy cats!” Max stopped in the act of hanging up his overcoat. “Do you
+mean--why, I can’t shave myself! I’ll cut my head off.”
+
+“You’ll do more than that,” I retorted grimly. “You will carry coal and
+tend fires and empty ash pans, and when you are not doing any of those
+things there will be pots and pans to wash and beds to make.”
+
+Then there WAS a row. We had worked back to the den now, and I stood in
+front of the fireplace and let the storm beat around me, and tried
+to look perfectly cold and indifferent, and not to see Mr. Harbison’s
+shocked face. No wonder he thought them a lot of savages, browbeating
+their hostess the way they did.
+
+“It’s a fool thing anyhow,” Max Reed wound up, “to celebrate the
+anniversary of a divorce--especially--” Here he caught Jim’s eye and
+stopped. But I had suddenly remembered. BELLA DOWN IN THE BASEMENT!
+
+Could anything have been worse? And of course she would have hysteria
+and then turn on me and blame me for it all. It all came over me at once
+and overwhelmed me, while Anne was crying and saying she wouldn’t cook
+if she starved for it, and Aunt Selina was taking off her wraps. I felt
+queer all over, and I sat down suddenly. Mr. Harbison was looking at me,
+and he brought me a glass of wine.
+
+“It won’t be so bad as you fear,” he said comfortingly. “There will be
+no danger once we are vaccinated, and many hands make light work. They
+are pretty raw now, because the thing is new to them, but by morning
+they will be reconciled.”
+
+“It isn’t the work; it is something entirely different,” I said. And it
+was. Bella and work could hardly be spoken in the same breath.
+
+If I had only turned her out as she deserved to be, when she first came,
+instead of allowing her to carry through the wretched farce about seeing
+Takahiro! Or if I had only run to the basement the moment the house was
+quarantined, and got her out the areaway or the coal hole! And now time
+was flying, and Aunt Selina had me by the arm, and any moment I expected
+Bella to pounce on us through the doorway and the whole situation to
+explode with a bang.
+
+It was after eleven before they were rational enough to discuss ways and
+means, and, of course, the first thing suggested was that we all adjourn
+below stairs and clean up after dinner. I could have slain Max Reed for
+the notion, and the Mercer girls for taking him up.
+
+“Of course we will,” they said in a duet. “What a lark!” And they
+actually began to pin up their dinner gowns. It was Jim who stopped
+that.
+
+“Oh, look here, you people,” he objected, “I’m not going to let you do
+that. We’ll get some servants in tomorrow. I’ll go down and put out the
+lights. There will be enough clean dishes for breakfast.”
+
+It was lucky for me that they started a new discussion then and there
+about who would get the breakfast. In the midst of the excitement I
+slipped away to carry the news to Bella. She was where I had left her,
+and she had made herself a cup of tea, and was very much at home, which
+was natural.
+
+“Do you know,” she said ominously, “that you have been away for two
+hours; and that I have gone through agonies of nervousness for fear Jim
+Wilson would come down and think I came here to see him?”
+
+“No one would think that, Bella,” I soothed her. “Everybody knows you
+loathe him--Jim, too.” She looked at me over the edge of her cup.
+
+“I’ll run along now,” she said, “since Takahiro isn’t here. And if Jim
+has any sense at all, he will clear out every maid in the house. I never
+saw such a kitchen in all my life. Well, lead the way, Kit. I suppose
+they are deep in bridge, or roulette, or something.”
+
+She was fixing her veil, and I saw I would have to tell her. Personally,
+I would much rather have told her the house was on fire.
+
+“Wait a minute, Bella,” I said. “You see, something queer has happened.
+You know this is the anniversary--well, you know what it is--and Jim was
+awfully glum. So we thought we would come--”
+
+“What are you driving at?” she demanded. “You are sea-green, Kit. What’s
+the matter? You needn’t think I mind because Jim has a jollification to
+celebrate his divorce.”
+
+“It--it was Takahiro--in the ambulance,” I blurted. “Smallpox.
+We--Bella, we are shut in, quarantined.”
+
+She didn’t faint. She just sat down and stared at me, and I stared back
+at her. Then a miserable alarm clock on the table suddenly went off like
+an explosion, and Bella began to laugh. I knew what that was--hysteria.
+She always had attacks like that when things went wrong. I was quite
+despairing by that time; I hoped they would all hear her and come
+downstairs and take her up and put her to bed like a Christian, so she
+could giggle her soul out. But after a bit she quieted down and began to
+cry softly, and I knew the worst was over. I gave her a shake, and she
+was so angry that she got over it altogether.
+
+“Kit, you are horrid,” she choked. “Don’t you see what a position I am
+in? I am not going upstairs to face Anne and the rest of them. You can
+just put me in the coal cellar.”
+
+“Isn’t there a window you could get through?” I asked desperately.
+“Locking the door doesn’t shut up a whole house.”
+
+Bella’s courage revived at that, and she said yes, there were windows,
+plenty of them, only she didn’t see how she could get out. And I
+said she would HAVE to get out, because I was playing Bella in the
+performance, and I didn’t care to have an understudy. Then the situation
+dawned on her, and she sat down and laughed herself weak in the knees.
+Of course she wanted to stay, then, and see the fun out. But I was firm;
+she would have to go, and I told her so. Things were complicated enough
+without her.
+
+Well, we looked funny, no doubt, Bella in a Russian pony automobile coat
+over the black satin she had worn at the Clevelands’ dinner, and I in
+cream lace, the skirt gathered up from the kitchen floor, with Bella’s
+ermine pelerine around my bare shoulders, and dishes and overturned
+chairs everywhere.
+
+Bella knew more about the lower regions of her ex-home than I would have
+thought. She opened a door in a corner and led the way through a narrow
+hall past the refrigerating room, to a huge, cemented cellar, with a
+furnace in the center, and a half-dozen electric lights making it really
+brilliant.
+
+“Get a chair,” Bella said over her shoulder, excitedly. “I can get out
+easily here, through the coal hole. Imagine my--”
+
+But it was my turn to grip Bella. From behind the furnace were coming
+the most terrible sounds, rasping noises that fairly frayed the silk of
+my nerves. We stood petrified for an instant. Then Bella laughed. “They
+are not all gone,” she said carefully. “Some one is asleep there.”
+
+We tiptoed to where we could see around the furnace, and, sure enough,
+some one WAS asleep there. Only, it was not one of the servants; it was
+a portly policeman, with a newspaper and an empty plate on the floor on
+one side, and a champagne bottle on the other. He had slid down in his
+chair, with his chin on his brass buttons, and his helmet had rolled a
+dozen feet away. Bella had to clap her hand over her mouth.
+
+“Fairly caught!” she whispered. “Sartor Resartus, the arrester arrested.
+Oh, Jim and his flawless service!”
+
+But after we got over our surprise, we saw the situation was serious.
+The policeman was threatening to awaken. Once he stopped snoring to yawn
+noisily, and we beat a hasty retreat. Bella switched off the lights in
+a hurry and locked the door behind us. We hardly breathed until we were
+back in the kitchen again, and everything quiet. And then Jimmy called
+my name from up above somewheres.
+
+“I am going to call him down, Bella,” I said firmly. “Let him help you
+out. I’m sure I don’t see why I should have all this when the two of
+you--”
+
+“Oh, no, no! Surely, Kit, you wouldn’t be so cruel!” she whispered
+pleadingly. “You know what he would think. He--oh, Kit, let them all get
+settled for the night, and then come down, like a dear, and help me out.
+I know loads of ways--honestly I do.”
+
+“If I leave you here,” I debated, “what about the policeman?”
+
+“Never mind him”--frantically. “Listen! There’s Jim up in the pantry.
+Run, for the sake of Heaven!”
+
+So--I ran. At the top of the stairs I met Jimmy, very crumpled as to
+shirt-front and dejected as to face.
+
+“I’ve been hunting everywhere for you,” he said dismally. “I thought you
+had added to the general merriment by falling downstairs and breaking
+your neck.”
+
+I went past him with my chin up. Now that I had time to think about it,
+I was furiously angry with him.
+
+“Kit!” he called after me appealingly, but I would not hear. Then he
+adopted different tactics. He took advantage of my catching my foot in
+the lace of my gown to pass me, and to stand with his back against the
+door.
+
+“You’re not going until you hear me, Kit,” he declared miserably. “In
+the first place, for all you are down on me, is it my fault? Honestly,
+now IS IT MY FAULT?”
+
+I refused to speak.
+
+“I was coming home to be miserable alone,” he went on, “and--oh, I know
+you meant well, Kit; but YOU asked all these crazy people here.”
+
+“Perhaps you will give me credit for some things,” I said wearily. “I
+did NOT give Takahiro smallpox, for instance, and--if you will permit me
+to mention the fact--Aunt Selina is not MY Aunt Selina.”
+
+“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about,” Jimmy went on wretchedly,
+trying not to look at me. “You see, when they were rowing so about who
+would get the breakfast--I never saw such a lot of people; half of
+them never touch breakfast, but of course now they want all kinds of
+things--when they were talking, Aunt Selina said she knew YOU would get
+it, being the hostess, and responsible, besides knowing where things
+are kept.” He had fixed his eyes on the orchids, and he looked shrunken,
+actually shrunken. “I thought,” he finished, “you might give me a few
+pointers now, and I could come down in the morning, and--and fuss up
+something, coffee and so on. I would say you did it! Oh, hang it all,
+Kit, why don’t you say something?”
+
+“What do you want me to say?” I demanded. “That I love to cook, and of
+course I’ll fix trays and carry them up in the morning to Anne Brown
+and Leila Mercer and the rest; and that I will have the shaving water
+ready--”
+
+“I know what I’m going to do,” Jimmy said, with a sudden resolution.
+“Aunt Selina and her money can go to blazes. I am going right upstairs
+and tell her the truth, tell her who you are, what I am, and all the
+rest of it.” He opened the door.
+
+“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” I gasped, catching him in time. “Don’t
+you dare, Jimmy Wilson! Why, what would they think of me? After letting
+her call me Bella, and him--Jim, if Mr. Harbison ever learns the
+truth--I--I will take poison. If we are going to be shut up here
+together, we will have to carry it on. I couldn’t stand the disgrace.”
+
+In spite of an heroic effort, Jim looked relieved. “They have been
+hunting for the linen closet,” he said, more cheerfully, “and there will
+be room enough, I think. Harbison and I will hang out in the studio;
+there are two couches there. I’m afraid you’ll have to take Aunt Selina,
+Kit.”
+
+“Certainly,” I said coldly. That was the way it was all along. Whenever
+there was something to do that no one else would undertake--any
+unpleasant responsibility--that entire mongrel household turned with one
+gesture and pointed its finger at me! Well, it is over now, and I ought
+not to be bitter, considering everything.
+
+It was quite characteristic of that memorable evening (that is quite
+novelesque, I think) that my interview with Jimmy should have a
+sensational ending. He was terribly down, of course, and as I was trying
+to pass him to get to the door, he caught my hand.
+
+“You’re a girl in a thousand, Kit,” he said forlornly. “If I were not so
+damnably, hopelessly, idiotically in love with--somebody else, I should
+be crazy about you.”
+
+“Don’t be maudlin,” I retorted. “Would you mind letting my hand go?” I
+felt sure Bella could hear.
+
+“Oh, come now, Kit,” he implored, “we’ve always got along so well. It’s
+a shame to let a thing like this make us bad friends. Aren’t you ever
+going to forgive me?”
+
+“Never,” I said promptly. “When I once get away, I don’t want ever to
+see you again. I was never so humiliated in my life. I loathe you!”
+
+Then I turned around, and, of course, there was Aunt Selina with her
+eyes protruding until you could have knocked them off with a stick, and
+beside her, very red and uncomfortable, Mr. Harbison!
+
+“Bella!” she said in a shocked voice, “is that the way you speak to your
+husband! It is high time I came here, I think, and took a hand in this
+affair.”
+
+“Oh, never mind, Aunt Selina,” Jim said, with a sheepish grin.
+“Kit--Bella is tired and nervous. This is a h--deuce of a situation.
+No--er--servants, and all that.”
+
+But Aunt Selina did mind, and showed it. She pulled the unlucky Harbison
+man through the door and closed it, and then stood glaring at both of
+us.
+
+“Every little quarrel is an apple knocked from the tree of love,” she
+announced oratorically.
+
+“This was a very little quarrel,” Jim said, edging toward the door;
+“a--a green apple, Aunt Selina, a colicky little green apple.” But she
+was not to be diverted.
+
+“Bella,” she said severely, “you said you loathed him. You didn’t mean
+that.”
+
+“But I do!” I cried hysterically. “There isn’t any word to tell how
+I--how I detest him.”
+
+Then I swept past them all and flew to Bella’s dressing room and locked
+myself in. Aunt Selina knocked until she was tired, then gave up and
+went to bed.
+
+That was the night Anne Brown’s pearl collar was stolen!
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. A MIGHTY POOR JOKE
+
+Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different grade of
+society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they are restrained
+by obligation or environment they become a little overkeen at bridge,
+or take the wrong sables, or stuff a gold-backed brush into a muff at
+a reception. You remember the ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell
+had, fastened with fine gold chains? And the sensation it caused at the
+Bucknell cotillion when Mrs. Van Zire went sweeping to her carriage with
+two feet of gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?
+
+But Anne’s pearl collar was different. In the first place, instead of
+three or four hundred people, the suspicion had to be divided among ten.
+And of those ten, at least eight of us were friends, and the other two
+had been vouched for by the Browns and Jimmy. It was a horrible mix-up.
+For the necklace was gone--there couldn’t be any doubt of that--and
+although, as Dallas said, it couldn’t get out of the house, still, there
+were plenty of places to hide the thing.
+
+The worst of our trouble really originated with Max Reed, after all.
+For it was Max who made the silly wager over the telephone, with Dick
+Bagley. He bet five hundred even that one of us, at least, would break
+quarantine within the next twenty-four hours, and, of course, that
+settled it. Dick told it around the club as a joke, and a man who owns
+a newspaper heard him and called up the paper. Then the paper called up
+the health office, after setting up a flaming scare-head, “Will Money
+Free Them? Board of Health versus Millionaire.”
+
+It was almost three when the house settled down--nobody had any night
+clothes, although finally, through Dallas, who gave them to Anne, who
+gave them to the rest, we got some things of Jimmy’s--and I was still
+dressed. The house was perfectly quiet, and, after listening carefully,
+I went slowly down the stairs. There was a light in the hall, and
+another back in the dining room, and I got along without any trouble.
+But the pantry, where the stairs led down, was dark, and the wretched
+swinging door would not stay open.
+
+I caught my skirt in the door as I went through, and I had to stop to
+loosen it. And in that awful minute I heard some one breathing just
+beside me. I had stooped to my gown, and I turned my head without
+straightening--I couldn’t have raised myself to an erect posture, for
+my knees were giving way under me--and just at my feet lay the still
+glowing end of a match!
+
+I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Then I said sharply:
+
+“Who’s there?”
+
+The man was so close it is a wonder I had not walked into him; his voice
+was right at my ear.
+
+“I am sorry I startled you,” he said quietly. “I was afraid to speak
+suddenly, or move, for fear I would do--what I have done.”
+
+It was Mr. Harbison.
+
+“I--I thought you were--it is very late,” I managed to say, with dry
+lips. “Do you know where the electric switch is?”
+
+“Mrs. Wilson!” It was clear he had not known me before. “Why, no; don’t
+you?”
+
+“I am all confused,” I muttered, and beat a retreat into the dining
+room. There, in the friendly light, we could at least see each other,
+and I think he was as much impressed by the fact that I had not
+undressed as I was by the fact that he HAD, partly. He wore a hideous
+dressing gown of Jimmy’s, much too small, and his hair, parted and
+plastered down in the early evening, stood up in a sort of brown brush
+all over his head. He was trying to flatten it with his hands.
+
+“It must be three o’clock,” he said, with polite surprise, “and the
+house is like a barn. You ought not to be running around with your arms
+uncovered, Mrs. Wilson. Surely you could have called some of us.”
+
+“I didn’t wish to disturb any one,” I said, with distinct truth.
+
+“I suppose you are like me,” he said. “The novelty of the situation--and
+everything. I got to thinking things over, and then I realized the
+studio was getting cold, so I thought I would come down and take a look
+at the furnace. I didn’t suppose any one else would think of it. But
+I lost myself in that pantry, stumbled against a half-open drawer, and
+nearly went down the dumb-waiter.” And, as if in judgment on me, at
+that instant came two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below,
+and inarticulate words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of
+course, coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. Harbison
+looked startled.
+
+“Oh, by the way,” I said, as carelessly as I could. “In the excitement,
+I forgot to mention it. There is a policeman asleep in the furnace room.
+I--I suppose we will have to keep him now,” I finished as airily as
+possible.
+
+“Oh, a policeman--in the cellar,” he repeated, staring at me, and he
+moved toward the pantry door.
+
+“You needn’t go down,” I said feverishly, with visions of Bella Knowles
+sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by soiled dishes and all the
+cheerless aftermath of a dinner party. “Please don’t go down. I--it’s
+one of my rules--never to let a stranger go down to the kitchen. I--I’m
+peculiar--that way--and besides, it’s--it’s mussy.”
+
+Bang! Crash! through the register pipe, and some language quite
+articulate. Then silence.
+
+“Look here, Mrs. Wilson,” he said resolutely. “What do I care about the
+kitchen? I’m going down and arrest that policeman for disturbing the
+peace. He will have the pipes down.”
+
+“You must not go,” I said with desperate firmness. “He--he is probably
+in a very dangerous state just now. We--I--locked him in.”
+
+The Harbison man grinned and then became serious.
+
+“Why don’t you tell me the whole thing?” he demanded. “You’ve been in
+trouble all evening, and--you can trust me, you know, because I am a
+stranger; because the minute this crazy quarantine is raised I am off
+to the Argentine Republic,” (perhaps he said Chili) “and because I don’t
+know anything at all about you. You see, I have to believe what you
+tell me, having no personal knowledge of any of you to go on. Now tell
+me--whom have you hidden in the cellar, besides the policeman?”
+
+There was no use trying to deceive him; he was looking straight into my
+eyes. So I decided to make the best of a bad thing. Anyhow, it was going
+to require strength to get Bella through the coal hole with one arm and
+restrain the policeman with the other.
+
+“Come,” I said, making a sudden resolution, and led the way down the
+stairs.
+
+He said nothing when he saw Bella, for which I was grateful. She was
+sitting at the table, with her arms in front of her, and her head buried
+in them. And then I saw she was asleep. Her hat and veil were laid
+beside her, and she had taken off her coat and draped it around her. She
+had rummaged out a cold pheasant and some salad, and had evidently had
+a little supper. Supper and a nap, while I worried myself gray-headed
+about her!
+
+“She--she came in unexpectedly--something about the butler,” I explained
+under my breath. “And--she doesn’t want to stay. She is on bad terms
+with--with some of the people upstairs. You can see how impossible the
+situation is.”
+
+“I doubt if we can get her out,” he said, as if the situation were quite
+ordinary. “However, we can try. She seems very comfortable. It’s a pity
+to rouse her.”
+
+Here the prisoner in the furnace room broke out afresh. It sounded
+as though he had taken a lump of coal and was attacking the lock. Mr.
+Harbison followed the noise, and I could hear him arguing, not gently.
+
+“Another sound,” he finished, “and you won’t get out of here at all,
+unless you crawl up the furnace pipe!”
+
+When he came back, Bella was rousing. She lifted her head with her eyes
+shut and then opened them one at a time, blinked, and sat up. She didn’t
+see him at first.
+
+“You wretch!” she said ungratefully, after she had yawned. “Do you know
+what time it is? And that--” Then she saw Mr. Harbison and sat staring
+at him.
+
+“This is Mr. Harbison,” I said to her hastily. “He--he came with Anne
+and Dal and--he is shut in, too.”
+
+By that time Bella had seen how handsome he was, and she took a hair pin
+out of her mouth, and arched her eyebrows, which was always Bella’s best
+pose.
+
+“I am Miss Knowles,” she said sweetly (of course, the court had given
+her back her name), “and I stopped in tonight, thinking the house
+was empty, to see about a--a butler. Unfortunately, the house was
+quarantined just at that time, and--here I am. Surely there can not be
+any harm in helping me to get out?” (Pleading tone.) “I have not been
+exposed to any contagion, and in the exhausted state of my health the
+confinement would be positively dangerous.”
+
+She rolled her eyes at him, and I could see she was making an
+impression. Of course she was free. She had a perfect right to marry
+again, but I will say this: Bella is a lot better looking by electric
+light than she is the next morning.
+
+The upshot of it was that the gentleman who built bridges and looked
+down on society from a lofty, lonely pinnacle agreed to help one of the
+most gleaming members of the aforesaid society to outwit the law.
+
+It took about fifteen minutes to quiet the policeman. Nobody ever knew
+what Mr. Harbison did to him, but for twenty-four hours he was quite
+tractable. He changed after that, but that comes later in the story.
+Anyhow, the Harbison man went upstairs and came down with a Bagdad
+curtain and a cushion to match, and took them into the furnace room,
+and came out and locked the door behind him, and then we were ready for
+Bella’s escape.
+
+But there were four special officers and three reporters watching the
+house, as a result of Max Reed’s idiocy. Once, after trying all the
+other windows and finding them guarded, we discovered a little bit of a
+hole in an out-of-the-way corner that looked like a ventilator and was
+covered with a heavy wire screen. No prisoners ever dug their way out of
+a dungeon with more energy than that with which we attached that screen,
+hacking at it with kitchen knives, whispering like conspirators, being
+scratched with the ragged edges of the wire, frozen with the cold air
+one minute and boiling with excitement the next. And when the wire was
+cut, and Bella had rolled her coat up and thrust it through and was
+standing on a chair ready to follow, something outside that had looked
+like a barrel moved, and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
+It would be certain to be undignified, and probably it would be
+unpleasant--later.”
+
+We coaxed and pleaded and tried to bribe, and that happened, as it
+turned out, to be one of the worst things we had to endure. For the
+whole conversation came out the next afternoon in the paper, with the
+most awful drawings, and the reporter said it was the flashing of the
+jewels we wore that first attracted his attention. And that brings me
+back to the robbery.
+
+For when we had crept back to the kitchen, and Bella was fumbling
+for her handkerchief to cry into and the Harbison man was trying to
+apologize for the language he had used to the reporter, and I was on the
+verge of a nervous chill--well, it was then that Bella forgot all about
+crying and jumped and held out her arm.
+
+“My diamond bracelet!” she screeched. “Look, I’ve lost it.”
+
+Well, we went over every inch of that basement, until I knew every crack
+in the flooring, every spot on the cement. And Bella was nasty, and said
+that she had never seen that part of the house in such condition, and
+that if I had acted like a sane person and put her out, when she had no
+business there at all, she would have had her freedom and her bracelet,
+and that if we were playing a joke on her (as if we felt like joking!)
+we would please give her the bracelet and let her go and die in a
+corner; she felt very queer.
+
+At half-past four o’clock we gave up.
+
+“It’s gone,” I said. “I don’t believe you wore it here. No one could
+have taken it. There wasn’t a soul in this part of the house, except the
+policeman and he’s locked in.”
+
+At five o’clock we put her to sleep in the den. She was in a fearful
+temper, and I was glad enough to be able to shut the door on her. Tom
+Harbison--that was his name--helped me to creep upstairs, and wanted
+to get me a glass of ale to make me sleep. But I said it would be of no
+use, as I had to get up and get the breakfast. The last thing he said
+was that the policeman seemed above the average in intelligence, and
+perhaps we could train him to do plain cooking and dishwashing.
+
+I did not go to sleep at once. I lay on the chintz-covered divan in
+Bella’s dressing room and stared at the picture of her with the violets
+underneath. I couldn’t see what there was about Bella to inspire such
+undying devotion, but I had to admit that she had looked handsome that
+night, and that the Harbison man had certainly been impressed.
+
+At seven o’clock Jimmy Wilson pounded at my door, and I could have
+choked him joyfully. I dragged myself to the door and opened it, and
+then I heard excited voices. Everybody seemed to be up but Aunt Selina,
+and they were all talking at once.
+
+Anne Brown was in the corner of the group, waving her hands, while
+Dallas was trying to hook the back of her gown with one hand and hold a
+blanket around himself with the other. No one was dressed except Anne,
+and she had been up for an hour, looking in shoes and under the corners
+of rugs and around the bed clothing for her jeweled collar. When she saw
+me she began all over again.
+
+“I had it on when I went into my room,” she declared, “and I put it on
+the dressing table when I undressed. I meant to put it under my pillow,
+but I forgot. And I didn’t sleep well; I was awake half the night.
+Wasn’t I, Dal? Then, when the clock downstairs in the hall was chiming
+five, something roused me, and I sat up in bed. It was still dark, but I
+pinched Dal and said there was somebody in the room. You remember that,
+don’t you, Dal?”
+
+“I thought you had nightmare,” he said sheepishly.
+
+“I lay still for ages, it seemed to me, and then--the door into the
+hall closed. I heard the catch click. I turned on the light over the bed
+then, and the room was empty. I thought of my collar, and although it
+seemed ridiculous, with the house sealed as it is, and all of us friends
+for years--well, I got up and looked, and it was gone!”
+
+No one spoke for an instant. It WAS a queer situation, for the collar
+was gone; Anne’s red eyes showed it was true. And there we stood, every
+one of us a miserable picture of guilt, and tried to look innocent and
+debonair and unsuspicious. Finally Jim held up his hand and signified
+that he wanted to say something.
+
+“It’s like this,” he said, “until this thing is cleared up, for Heaven’s
+sake, let’s try to be sane! If every fellow thinks the other fellow
+did it, this house will be a nice little hell to live in. And if
+anybody”--here he glared around--“if anybody has got funny and is hiding
+those jewels, I want to say that he’d better speak up now. Later, it
+won’t be so easy for him. It’s a mighty poor joke.”
+
+But nobody spoke.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. WE MAKE AN OMELET
+
+It was Betty Mercer who said she was hungry, and got us switched from
+the delicate subject of which was the thief to the quite as pressing
+subject of which was to be cook. Aunt Selina had slept quietly through
+the whole thing--we learned afterward that she customarily slept on her
+left side, which was on her good ear. We gathered in the Dallas Browns’
+room, and Jimmy proposed a plan.
+
+“We can have anything sent in that we want,” he suggested speciously,
+“and if Dal doesn’t make good with the city fathers, you girls can
+get some clothes anyhow. Then, we can have dinner sent from one of the
+hotels.”
+
+“Why not all the meals?” Max suggested. “I hope you’re not going to be
+small about things, Jimmy.”
+
+“It ought to be easy,” Jim persisted, ignoring the remark, “for nine
+reasonably intelligent people to boil eggs and make coffee, which is all
+we need for breakfast, with some fruit.”
+
+“Nine of us!” Dallas said wickedly, looking at Tom Harbison, who was
+out of earshot, “Why nine of us? I thought Kit here, otherwise known as
+Bella, was going to show off her housewifely skill.”
+
+It ended, however, with Mr. Harbison writing out a lot of slips, cook,
+scullery-maid, chamber-maid, parlor-maid, furnace-man, and butler, and
+as that left two people over--we didn’t count Aunt Selina--he added
+another furnace-man and a trained nurse. Betty Mercer drew the trained
+nurse slip, and, of course, she was delighted. It seems funny now to
+look back and think what a dreadful time she really had, for Aunt Selina
+took the grippe, you know, that very day.
+
+It was fate that I should go back to that awful kitchen, for of course
+my slip said “cook.” Mr. Harbison was butler, and Max and Dal got the
+furnace, although neither of them had ever been nearer to a bucket of
+coal than the coupons on mining stock. Anne got the bedrooms, and Leila
+was parlor-maid. It was Jimmy who got the scullery work, but he was
+quite crushed by this time, and did not protest at all.
+
+Max was in a very bad temper; I suppose he had not had enough sleep--no
+one had. But he came over while the lottery was going on and stood over
+me and demanded unpleasantly, in a whisper, that I stop masquerading as
+another man’s wife and generally making a fool of myself--which is the
+way he put it. And I knew in my heart that he was right, and I hated him
+for it.
+
+“Why don’t you go and tell him--them?” I asked nastily. No one was
+paying any attention to us. “Tell them that, to be obliging, I have
+nearly drowned in a sea of lies; tell them that I am not only not
+married, but that I never intend to marry; tell them that we are a lot
+of idiots with nothing better to do than to trifle with strangers within
+our gates, people who build--I mean, people that are worth two to our
+one! Run and tell them.”
+
+He looked at me for a minute, then he turned on his heel and left me. It
+looked as though Max might be going to be difficult.
+
+While I was improvising an apron out of a towel, and Anne was pinning a
+sheet into a kimono, so she could take off her dinner gown and still be
+proper, Dallas harked back to the robbery.
+
+“Ann put the collar on the table there,” he said. “There’s no mistake
+about that. I watched her do it, for I remember thinking it was the sole
+reminder I had that Consolidated Traction ever went above thirty-nine.”
+
+Max was looking around the room, examining the window locks and
+whistling between his teeth. He was in disgrace with every one, for by
+that time it was light enough to see three reporters with cameras across
+the street waiting for enough sun to snap the house, and everybody knew
+that it was Max and his idiotic wager that had done it. He had made two
+or three conciliatory remarks, but no one would speak to him. His antics
+were so queer, however, that we were all watching him, and when he had
+felt over the rug with his hands, and raised the edges, and tried to
+lift out the chair seats, and had shaken out Dal’s shoes (he said people
+often hid things and then forgot about it), he made a proposition.
+
+“If you will take that infernal furnace from around my neck, I’ll
+undertake either to find the jewels or to show up the thief,” he
+said quietly. And of course, with all the people in the house under
+suspicion, every one had to hail the suggestion with joy, and to offer
+his assistance, and Jimmy had to take Max’s share of the furnace. So
+they took the scullery slip downstairs to the policeman, and gave Jim
+Max’s share of the furnace. (Yes, I had broken the policeman to them
+gently. Of course, Anne said at once that he was the thief, but they
+found him tucked in and sound asleep with his back against the furnace.)
+
+“In the first place,” Max said, standing importantly in the middle of
+the room, “we retired between two and three--nearer three. So the
+theft occurred between three and five, when Anne woke up. Was your door
+locked, Dal?”
+
+“No. The door into the hall was, but the door into the dressing room was
+open, and we found the door from there into the hall open this morning.”
+
+“From three until five,” Max repeated. “Was any one out of his room
+during that time?”
+
+“I was,” said Tom Harbison promptly, from the foot of the bed. “I was
+prowling all around somewhere about four, searching”--he glanced at
+me--“for a drink of water. But as I don’t know a pearl from a glass
+bead, I hope you exonerate me.”
+
+Everybody laughed and said, “Of course,” and “Sure, old man,” and
+changed the subject quickly.
+
+While that excitement was on, I got Jim to one side and told him about
+Bella. His good-natured face was radiant at first.
+
+“I suppose she DID come to see Takahiro, eh, Kit?” he asked delicately.
+“She didn’t say anything about me?”
+
+“Nothing good. She said the house was in a disgraceful condition,” I
+said heartlessly. “And her diamond bracelet was stolen while she took
+a nap on the kitchen table”--he groaned--“and--oh, Jim, you are such
+a goose! If I could only manage my own affairs the way I could my
+friends’! She’s too sure of you, Jimmy. She knows you adore her,
+and--how brutal could you be, Jim?”
+
+“Fair,” he said. “I may have undiscovered depths of brutality that I
+have never had occasion to use. However, I might try. Why?”
+
+“Listen, Jim,” I urged. “It was always Bella who did things here; she
+managed the house, she tyrannized over her friends, and she bullied you.
+Yes, she did. Now she’s here, without your invitation, and she has to
+stay. It’s your turn to bully, to dictate terms, to be coldly civil or
+politely rude. Make her furious at you. If she is jealous, so much the
+better.”
+
+“How far would you sacrifice yourself on the altar of friendship?” he
+asked.
+
+“You may pay me all the attention you like, in public,” I replied, and
+after we shook hands we went together to Bella.
+
+There was an ominous pause when we went into the den. Bella was sitting
+by the register, with her furs on, and after one glance over her
+shoulder at us, she looked away again without speaking.
+
+“Bella,” Jim said appealingly. And then I pinched his arm, and he drew
+himself up and looked properly outraged.
+
+“Bella,” he said, coldly this time, “I can’t imagine why you have put
+yourself in this ridiculous position, but since you have--”
+
+She turned on him in a fury.
+
+“Put MYSELF in this position!”
+
+She was frantic. “It’s a plot, a wretched trick of yours, this
+quarantine, to keep me here.”
+
+Jim gasped, but I gave him a warning glance, and he swallowed hard.
+
+“On the contrary,” he said, with maddening quiet, “I would be the last
+person in the world to wish to perpetuate an indiscretion of yours. For
+it was hardly discreet, was it, to visit a bachelor establishment alone
+at ten o’clock at night? As far as my plotting to keep you here is
+concerned, I assure you that nothing could be further from my mind. Our
+paths were to be two parallel lines that never touch.” He looked at me
+for approval, and Bella was choking.
+
+“You are worse that I ever thought you,” she stormed. “I thought you
+were only a--a fool. Now I know you--for a brute!”
+
+Well, it ended by Jim’s graciously permitting Bella to remain--there
+being nothing else to do--and by his magnanimously agreeing to keep her
+real identity from Aunt Selina and Mr. Harbison, and to break the news
+of her presence to Anne and the rest. It created a sensation beside
+which Anne’s pearls faded away, although they came to the front again
+soon enough.
+
+Jim broke the news at once, gathering everybody but Harbison and Aunt
+Selina in the upper hall. He was palpitatingly nervous, but he tried to
+carry it off with a high hand.
+
+“It’s unfortunate,” he said, looking around the circle of faces, each
+one frozen with amazement, and just a suspicion, perhaps of incredulity.
+“It’s particularly unfortunate for her. You all know how high-strung
+she is, and if the papers should get hold of it--well, we’ll all have to
+make it as easy as we can for her.”
+
+With Jim’s eyes on them, they all swallowed the butler story without a
+gulp. But Anne was indignant.
+
+“It’s like Bella,” she snapped. “Well, she has made her bed and she can
+lie on it. I’m sure I shan’t make it for her. But if you want to know my
+opinion, Mr. Harbison may be a fool, but you can’t ram two Bellas, both
+NEE Knowles, down Miss Caruthers’ throat with a stick.”
+
+We had not thought of that before and every one looked blank. Finally,
+however, Jim said Bella’s middle name was Constantia, and we decided to
+call her that. But it turned out afterward that nobody could remember
+it in a hurry, and generally when we wanted to attract her attention, we
+walked across the room and touched her on the shoulder. It was quicker
+and safer.
+
+The name decided, we went downstairs in a line to welcome Bella, to try
+to make her feel at home, and to forget her deplorable situation. Leila
+had worked herself into a really sympathetic frame of mind.
+
+“Poor dear,” she said, on the way down. “Now don’t grin, anybody, just
+be cordial and glad to see her. I hope she doesn’t cry; you know the
+spells she takes.”
+
+We stopped outside the door, and everybody tried to look cheerful and
+sympathetic, and not grinny--which was as hard as looking as if we had
+had a cup of tea--and then Jim threw the door open and we filed in.
+
+Bella was comfortably reading by the fire. She had her feet up on a
+stool and a pillow behind her head. She did not even look at us for a
+minute; then she merely glanced up as she turned a page.
+
+“Dear me,” she said mockingly, “what a lot of frumps you all are! I had
+hoped it was some one with my breakfast.”
+
+Then she went on reading. As Leila said afterward, that kind of person
+OUGHT to be divorced.
+
+Aunt Selina came down just then and I left everybody trying to explain
+Bella’s presence to her, and fled to the kitchen. The Harbison man
+appeared while I was sitting hopelessly in front of the gas range, and
+showed me about it.
+
+“I don’t know that I ever saw one,” he said cheerfully, “but I know the
+theory. Likewise, by the same token, this tea kettle, set on the flame,
+will boil. That is not theory, however, that is early knowledge. ‘Polly,
+put the kettle on; we’ll all take tea.’ Look at that, Mrs. Wilson. I
+didn’t fight bacilli with boiled water at Chickamauga for nothing.”
+
+And then he let out the policeman and brought him into the kitchen. He
+was a large man, and his face was a curious mixture of amazement, alarm
+and dignity. No doubt we did look queer, still in parts of our evening
+clothes and I in the white silk and lace petticoat that belonged under
+my gown, with a yellow and black pajama coat of Jimmy’s as a sort of
+breakfast jacket.
+
+“This is Officer Flannigan,” Mr. Harbison said. “I explained our
+unfortunate position earlier in the morning, and he is prepared to
+accept our hospitality. Flannigan, every person in this house has got
+to work, as I also explained to you. You are appointed dishwasher and
+scullery maid.”
+
+The policeman looked dazed. Then, slowly, like dawn over a sleeping
+lake, a light of comprehension grew in his face.
+
+“Sure,” he said, laying his helmet on the table. “I’ll be glad to be
+doing anything I can to help. Me and Mrs. Wilson--we used to be friends.
+It’s many the time I’ve opened the carriage door for her, and she with
+her head in the air, and for all that, the pleasant smile. When any one
+around her was having a party and wanted a special officer, it was Mrs.
+Wilson that always said, Get Flannigan, Officer Timothy Flannigan. He’s
+your man.’”
+
+My heart had been going lower and lower. So he knew Bella, and he knew I
+was not Bella, although he had not grasped the fact that I was usurping
+her place. The odious Harbison man sat on the table and swung his feet.
+
+“I wonder if you know,” he said, looking around him, “how good it is
+to see a white woman so perfectly at home in a civilized kitchen again,
+after two years of food cooked by a filthy Indian squaw over a portable
+sheet-iron stove!”
+
+SO PERFECTLY AT HOME? I stood in the middle of the room and stared
+around at the copper things hanging up and the rows of blue and white
+crockery, and the dozens and hundreds of complicated-looking utensils,
+whose names I had never even heard, and I was dazed. I tried with some
+show of authority to instruct Flannigan about gathering up the soiled
+things, and, after listening in puzzled silence for a minute, he
+stripped off his blue coat with a tolerant smile.
+
+“Lave em to me, miss,” he said. The “miss” passed unnoticed. “I mayn’t
+give em a Turkish bath, which is what you are describin’, but I’ll get
+the grease off all right. I always clean up while the missus is in bed
+with a young un.”
+
+He rolled up his sleeves, found a brown checked gingham apron behind
+the door, and tied it around his neck with the ease of practice. Then
+he cleared off the plates, eating what appealed to him as he did so, and
+stopping now and again for a deep-throated chuckle.
+
+“I’m thinkin’,” he said once, stopping with a dish in the air, “what a
+deuce of a noise there will be when the vaccination doctor comes around
+this mornin’. In a week every one of us will be nursin’ a sore arm or
+walkin’ on one leg, beggin’ your pardon, miss. The last time the force
+was vaccinated, I asked to be done behind me ear; I needed me legs and I
+needed me arms, but didn’t need me head much!”
+
+He threw his head back and laughed. Mr. Harbison laughed. Oh, we were
+very cheerful! And that awful stove stared at me, and the kettle began
+to hum, and Aunt Selina sent down word that she was not well, and would
+like some omelet on her tray. Omelet!
+
+I knew that it was made of eggs, but that was the extent of my
+knowledge. I muttered an excuse and ran upstairs to Anne, but she was
+still sniffling over her necklace, and said she didn’t know anything
+about omelets and didn’t care. Food would choke her. Neither of the
+Mercer girls knew either, and Bella, who was still reading in the den,
+absolutely declined to help.
+
+“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. You can get yourself
+out, as you got yourself in,” she said nastily. “The simplest thing, if
+you don’t mind my suggesting it, is to poison the coffee and kill the
+lot of us. Only, if you decide to do it, let me know; I want to live
+just long enough to see Jimmy Wilson WRITHE!”
+
+Bella is the kind of person who gets on one’s nerves. She finds a
+grievance and hugs it; she does ridiculous things and blames other
+people. And she flirts.
+
+I went downstairs despondently, and found that Mr. Harbison had
+discovered some eggs and was standing helplessly staring at them.
+
+“Omelet--eggs. Eggs--omelet. That’s the extent of my knowledge,” he
+said, when I entered. “You’ll have to come to my assistance.”
+
+It was then that I saw the cook book. It was lying on a shelf beside the
+clock, and while Mr. Harbison had his back turned I got it down. It was
+quite clear that the domestic type of woman was his ideal, and I did
+not care to outrage his belief in me. So I took the cook book into the
+pantry and read the recipe over three times. When I came back I knew it
+by heart, although I did not understand it.
+
+“I will tell you how,” I said with a great deal of dignity, “and since
+you want to help, you may make it yourself.”
+
+He was delighted.
+
+“Fine!” he said. “Suppose you give me the idea first. Then we’ll go over
+it slowly, bit by bit. We’ll make a big fluffy omelet, and if the others
+aren’t around, we’ll eat it ourselves.”
+
+“Well,” I said, trying to remember exactly, “you take two eggs--”
+
+“Two!” he repeated. “Two eggs for ten people!”
+
+“Don’t interrupt me,” I said irritably. “If--if two isn’t enough we can
+make several omelets, one after the other.”
+
+He looked at me with admiration.
+
+“Who else but you would have thought of that!” he remarked. “Well, here
+are two eggs. What next?”
+
+“Separate them,” I said easily. No, I didn’t know what it meant. I hoped
+he would; I said it as casually as I could, and I did not look at him. I
+knew he was staring at me, puzzled.
+
+“Separate them!” he said. “Why, they aren’t fastened together!” Then he
+laughed. “Oh, yes, of course!” When I looked he had put one at each end
+of the table. “Afraid they’ll quarrel, I suppose,” he said. “Well, now
+they’re separated.”
+
+“Then beat.”
+
+“First separate, then beat!” he repeated. “The author of that cook book
+must have had a mean disposition. What’s next? Hang them?” He looked up
+at me with his boyish smile.
+
+“Separate and beat,” I repeated. If I lost a word of that recipe I was
+gone. It was like saying the alphabet; I had to go to the beginning
+every time mentally.
+
+“Well,” he reflected, “you can’t beat an egg, no matter how cruel you
+may be, unless you break it first.” He picked up an egg and looked at
+it. “Separate!” he reflected. “Ah--the white from the--whatever you
+cooking experts call it--the yellow part.”
+
+“Exactly!” I exclaimed, light breaking on me. “Of course. I KNEW you
+would find it out.” Then back to the recipe--“beat until well mixed;
+then fold in the whites.”
+
+“Fold?” he questioned. “It looks pretty thin to fold, doesn’t it?
+I--upon my word, I never heard of folding an egg. Are you--but of course
+you know. Please come and show me how.”
+
+“Just fold them in,” I said desperately. “It isn’t difficult.” And
+because I was so transparent a fraud and knew he must find me out then,
+I said something about butter, and went into the pantry. That’s the
+trouble with a lie; somebody asks you to tell one as a favor to somebody
+else, and the first thing you know, you are having to tell a thousand,
+and trying to remember the ones you have told so you won’t contradict
+yourself, and the very person you have tried to help turns on you and
+reproaches you for being untruthful! I leaned my elbows despondently
+on the shelf of the kitchen pantry, with the feet of a guard visible
+through the high window over my head, and waited for Mr. Harbison to
+come in and demand that I fold a raw egg, and discover that I didn’t
+know anything about cooking, and was just as useless as all the others.
+
+He came. He held the bowl out to me and waved a fork in triumph.
+
+“I have solved it,” he said. “Or, rather, Flannigan and I have solved
+it. The mixture awaits the magic touch of the cook.”
+
+I honestly thought I could do the rest. It was only to be put in a pan
+and browned, and then in the oven three minutes. And I did it properly,
+but for two things: I should have greased the pan (but this was the
+book’s fault; it didn’t say) and I should have lighted the oven. The
+latter, however, was Mr. Harbison’s fault as much as mine, and I had wit
+enough to lay it to absent-mindedness on the part of both of us.
+
+After that, Aunt Selina or no Aunt Selina, we decided to have boiled
+eggs, and Mr. Harbison knew how to cook them. He put them in the
+tea kettle and then went to look at the furnace. And Officer Timothy
+Flannigan ground the coffee and gave his opinion of the board of health
+in no stinted terms. As for me, I burned my fingers and the toast, and
+felt myself growing hot and cold, for I was going to be found out as
+soon as Flannigan grasped the situation.
+
+Then, of course, I did the thing that caused me so much trouble later.
+I put down the toaster--at least the Harbison man said it was a
+toaster--and went over and stood in front of the policeman.
+
+“I don’t suppose you will understand--exactly,” I said, “but--but if
+anything occurs to--to make you think I am not--that things are not what
+they seem to be--I mean, what I say they are--you will understand that
+it is a joke, won’t you? A joke, you know.”
+
+Yes, that was what I said. I know it sounds like a raving delirium,
+but when Max came down and squizzled some bacon, as he said, and told
+Flannigan about the robbery, and how, whether it was a joke or deadly
+earnest, somebody in the house had taken Anne’s pearls, that wretched
+policeman winked at me solemnly over Max’s shoulder. Oh, it was awful!
+
+And, to add to my discomfort, the most unpleasant ideas WOULD obtrude
+themselves. WHAT was Mr. Harbison doing on the first floor of the house
+that night? Ice water, he had said. But there had been plenty of water
+in the studio! And he had told me it was the furnace.
+
+Mr. Harbison came back in a half hour, and I remembered the eggs. We
+fished them out of the tea kettle, and they were perfectly hard, but we
+ate them.
+
+The doctor from the board of health came that morning and vaccinated us.
+There was a great deal of excitement, and Aunt Selina was done on the
+arm. As she did not affect evening clothes this was entirely natural,
+but later on in the week, when the wretched things began to take, nobody
+dared to limp, and Leila made a terrible break by wearing a bandage on
+her left arm, after telling Aunt Selina that she had been vaccinated on
+the right.
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. CORRESPONDENTS’ DEPARTMENT
+
+The following letters were found in the house post box after the lifting
+of the quarantine, and later were presented to me by their writers,
+bound in white kid (the letters, not the authors, of course).
+
+FROM THOMAS HARBISON, LATE ENGINEER OF BRIDGES, PERUVIAN TRUNK LINES,
+SOUTH AMERICA, TO HENRY LLEWELLYN, CARE OF UNION NITRATE COMPANY,
+IQUIQUE, CHILI.
+
+Dear Old Man:
+
+I think I was fully a week trying to drive out of my mind my last
+glimpse of you with your sickly grin, pretending to be tickled to pieces
+that the only white man within two hundred miles of your shack was
+going on a holiday. You old bluffer! I used to hang over the rail of the
+steamer, on the way up, and see you standing as I left you beside the
+car with its mule and the Indian driver, and behind you a million miles
+of soul-destroying pampa. Never mind, Jack; I sent yesterday by mail
+steamer the cigarettes, pipes and tobacco, canned goods and poker
+chips. Put in some magazines, too, and the collars. Don’t know about the
+ties--guess it won’t matter down there.
+
+Nothing happened on the trip. One of the engines broke down three days
+out, and I spent all my time below decks for forty-eight hours. Chief
+engineer raving with D.T.’s. Got the engine fixed in record time, and
+haven’t got my hands clean yet. It was bully.
+
+With this I send the papers, which will tell you how I happen to be
+here, and why I have leisure to write you three days after landing. If
+the situation were not so ridiculous, it would be maddening. Here I
+am, off for a holiday and congratulating myself that I am foot free and
+heart free--yes, my friend, heart free--here I am, shut in the house
+of a man I never saw until last night, and wouldn’t care if I never
+saw again, with a lot of people who never heard of me, who are almost
+equally vague about South America, who play as hard at bridge as I ever
+worked at building one (forgive this, won’t you? The novelty has gone
+to my head), and who belong to the very class of extravagant,
+luxury-loving, non-producing parasites (isn’t that what we called them?)
+that you and I used to revile from our lofty Andean pinnacle.
+
+To come down to earth: here we are, six women and five men, including
+a policeman, not a servant in the house, and no one who knows how to do
+anything. They are really immensely interesting, these people; they
+all know each other very well, and it is “Jimmy” here, and “Dal”
+ there--Dallas Brown, who went to India with me, you remember my speaking
+of him--and they are good natured, too, except at meal times. The little
+hostess, Mrs. Wilson, took over the cooking, and although luncheon was
+better than breakfast, the food still leaves much to the imagination.
+
+I wish you could see this Mrs. Wilson, Hal. You would change a whole lot
+of your ideas. She is a thoroughbred, sure enough, and of course some
+of her beauty is the result of the exquisite care about which you and
+I--still from our Andean pinnacle--used to rant. But the fact is, she is
+more than that. She has fire, and pluck, no end. If you could have seen
+her this morning, standing in front of a cold kitchen range, determined
+to conquer it, and had seen the tilt of her chin when I offered to take
+over the cooking--you needn’t grin; I can cook, and you know it--you
+would understand what I mean. It was so clear that she was paralyzed
+with fright at the idea of getting breakfast, and equally clear that
+she meant to do it. By the way, I have learned that her name was McNair
+before she married this would-be artist, Wilson, and that she is a
+daughter of the McNair who financed the Callao branch!
+
+I have not met the others so intimately. There are two sisters named
+Mercer, inclined to be noisy--they are playing roulette in the next
+room now. One is small and dark, almost Hebraic in type, named Leila and
+called Lollie. The other, larger, very blonde and languishing, and with
+a decided preference for masculine society, even, saving the mark,
+mine! Dallas Brown’s wife, good looking, smokes cigarettes when I am not
+around--they all do, except Mrs. Wilson.
+
+Then there is a maiden aunt, who is ill today with grippe and
+excitement, and a Miss Knowles, who came for a moment last night to
+see Mrs. Wilson, was caught in the quarantine (see papers), and, after
+hiding all night in the basement, is sulking all day in her room. Her
+presence created an excitement out of all proportion to the apparent
+cause.
+
+From the fact that I have reason to know that my artist host and his
+beautiful wife are on bad terms, and from the significant glances with
+which the announcement of Miss Knowles’ presence was met, the state of
+affairs seems rather clear. Wilson impresses me as a spineless sort,
+anyhow, and when the lady of the basement shut herself away from the
+rest today and I happened on “Jimmy,” as they call him, pleading with
+her through the door, I very nearly kicked him down the stairs. Oh, yes,
+I’ll keep out, right enough; it isn’t my affair.
+
+By the way, after the quarantine and with the policeman locked in the
+furnace room, a pearl necklace and a diamond bracelet were stolen! Just
+ten of us to divide the suspicion! Upon my word, Hal, it’s the queerest
+situation I ever heard of. Which of us did it? I make a guess that not
+a few of us are fools, but which is the knave? The worst of it is, I am
+the only unaccredited member of the household!
+
+This is more scandal than I ever wrote in my life. Lay it to
+circumscribed environment, and the lack of twenty miles over the
+pampa before breakfast. We have all been vaccinated, and the officious
+gentlemen from the board of health have taken their grins and their
+formaldehyde and gone. Ye gods, how we cough!
+
+The Carlton order will go through all right, I think. Phoned him this
+morning. If it does, old man, we will take a month in September and
+explore the Mercator property.
+
+Do you know, Hal, I have been thinking lately that you and I stick too
+close to the grind. Business is right enough, but what’s the use of
+spending one’s best years succeeding in everything except the things
+that are worth while? I’ll be thirty sooner than I care to say, and--oh,
+well, you won’t understand. You’ll sit down there, with the Southern
+Cross and the rest of the infernal astronomical galaxy looking down on
+you, and the Indians chanting in the village, and you will think I have
+grown sentimental. I have not. You and I down there have been looking at
+the world through the reverse end of the glass. It’s a bully old world,
+Hal, and this is God’s part of it.
+
+Burn this letter after you read it; I suspect it is covered with germs.
+Well, happy days, old man.
+
+Yours, Tom
+
+P.S. By the way, can’t you spare some of the Indian pottery you picked
+up at Callao? I told Mrs. Wilson about it, and she was immensely
+interested. Send it to this address. Can you get it to the next
+steamer?--T.
+
+FROM MAXWELL REED TO RICHARD BURTON BAGLEY, UNIVERSITY CLUB, NEW YORK.
+
+Dear Dick:
+
+Enclosed find my check for five hundred, as per wager. Possibly you were
+within your rights in protecting your bet in the manner you chose, but
+while I do not wish to be offensive, your reporters are damnably so.
+
+Yours, Maxwell Reed
+
+FROM OFFICER FLANNIGAN TO MRS. MAGGIE FLANNIGAN, ERIN STREET.
+
+Dear Maggie:
+
+As soon as you receive this, go down to Mac and tell him the story as I
+tell you hear. Tell him I was walkin my beat, and I’d been afther seein
+Jimmy Alverini about doin the right thing for Mac on Monday, at the
+poles, when I seen a man hangin suspicious around this house, which is
+Mr. Wilson’s, on Ninety-fifth. And, of coorse, afther chasin the man a
+mile or more, I lose him, which was not my fault. So I go back to the
+Wilson house, and tell them to be careful about closin up fer the
+night, and while I’m standin in the hall, with all the swells around me,
+sparklin with jewels, the board of health sends a man to lock us all in,
+because the Jap thats been waiter has took the smallpox and gone to the
+hospitle. I stood me ground. I sez, sez I, you cant shtop an officer in
+pursute of his duty. I rafuse to be shut in. Be shure to tell Mac that.
+
+So here I am, and like to be for a month. Tell Mac theres four votes
+shut up here, and I can get them for him, if he can stop this monkey
+business.
+
+Then go over to the Dago Church on Webster Avenue and put a dollar in
+Saint Anthony’s box. He’ll see me out of this scrape, right enough. Do
+it at once. Now remember, go to Mac first; maybe you can get the dollar
+from him, and mind what you tell him.
+
+Your husband, Tim Flannigan
+
+FROM ME TO MOTHER--MRS. THEODORE McNAIR, HOTEL HAMILTON, BERMUDA.
+
+Dearest Mother:
+
+I hope you will get this before you read the papers, and when you DO
+read them, you are not to get excited and worried. I am as well as can
+be, and a great deal safer than I ever remember to have been in my life.
+We are quarantined, a lot of us, in Jim Wilson’s house, because his
+irreproachable Jap did a very reproachable thing--took smallpox. Now
+read on before you get excited. HIS ROOM HAS BEEN FUMIGATED, and we have
+been vaccinated. I am well and happy. I can’t be killed in a railway
+wreck or smashed when the car skids. Unless I drown myself in my bath,
+or jump through a window, positively nothing can happen to me. So gather
+up all your maternal anxieties and cast them to the Bermuda sharks.
+
+Anne Brown is here--see the papers for list--and if she can not play
+propriety, Jimmy’s Aunt Selina can. In fact, she doesn’t play at it; she
+works. I have telephoned Lizette for some clothes--enough for a couple
+of weeks, although Dallas promises to get us out sooner. Now, dear, do
+go ahead and have a nice time, and on no account come home. You could
+only have the carriage to stop in front of the house, and wave to me
+through a window.
+
+Mother, I want you to do something for me. You know who is down there,
+and--this is awfully delicate, Mumsy--but he’s a nice boy, and I thought
+I liked him. I guess you know he has been rather attentive. Now, I
+DO like him, Mumsy, but not the way I thought I did, and I want you
+to--very gently, of course--to discourage him a little. You know how
+I mean. He’s a dear boy, but I am so tired of people who don’t know
+anything but horses and motors.
+
+And, oh, yes,--do you remember a girl named Lucille Mellon who was at
+school with you in Rome? And that she married a man named Harbison?
+Well, her son is here! He builds railroads and bridges and things, and
+he even built himself an automobile down in South America, because he
+couldn’t afford to buy one, and burned wood in it! Wood! Think of it!
+
+I wired father in Chicago for fear he would come rushing home. The
+picture in the paper of the face at the basement window is supposed to
+be Mr. Harbison, but of course it isn’t any more like him than mine is
+like me.
+
+Anne Brown mislaid her pearl collar when she took it off last night,
+and has fussed herself into a sick headache. She declares it was stolen!
+Some of the people are playing bridge, Betty Mercer is doing a cake
+walk to the RHAPSODIE HONGROISE--Jim has no every-day music--and
+the telephone is ringing. We have received enough flowers for a
+funeral--somebody sent Lollie a Gates Ajar, only with the gates shut.
+
+There are no servants--think of it, Mumsy. I wish you had made me learn
+to cook. Mr. Harbison has shown me a little--he was a soldier in the
+Spanish War--but we girls are a terribly ignorant lot, Mumsy, about the
+real things of life.
+
+Now, don’t worry. It is more sport than camping in the Adirondacks, and
+not nearly so damp.
+
+Your loving daughter, Katherine.
+
+P.S.--South America must be wonderful. Why can’t we put the Gadfly in
+commission, and take a coasting trip this summer? It is a shame to own a
+yacht and never use it. K.
+
+THIS NOTE, EVIDENTLY DELIVERED BY MESSENGER, WAS FOUND AMONG OTHER
+LITTER IN THE VESTIBULE AFTER THE LIFTING OF THE QUARANTINE.
+
+Mr. Alex Dodds, City Editor, Mail and Star:
+
+Dear D.--Can’t get a picture. Have waited seven hours. They have closed
+the shutters.
+
+McCord.
+
+WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE ABOVE NOTE.
+
+Watch the roof.
+
+Dodds.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. FLANNIGAN’S FIND
+
+The most charitable thing would be to say nothing about the first day.
+We were baldly brutal--that’s the only word for it. And Mr. Harbison,
+with his beautiful courtesy--the really sincere kind--tried to patch up
+one quarrel after another and failed. He rose superbly to the occasion,
+and made something that he called a South American goulash for luncheon,
+although it was too salty, and every one was thirsty the rest of the
+day.
+
+Bella was horrid, of course. She froze Jim until he said he was going to
+sit in the refrigerator and cool the butter. She locked herself in the
+dressing room--it had been assigned to me, but that made no difference
+to Bella--and did her nails, and took three different baths, and refused
+to come to the table. And of course Jimmy was wild, and said she would
+starve. But I said, “Very well, let her starve. Not a tray shall leave
+my kitchen.” It was a comfort to have her shut up there anyhow; it
+postponed the time when she would come face to face with Flannigan.
+
+Aunt Selina got sick that day, as I have said. I was not so bitter as
+the others; I did not say that I wished she would die. The worst I ever
+wished her was that she might be quite ill for some time, and yet, when
+she began to recover, she was dreadful to me. She said for one thing,
+that it was the hard-boiled eggs and the state of the house that did
+it, and when I said that the grippe was a germ, she retorted that I had
+probably brought it to her on my clothing.
+
+You remember that Betty had drawn the nurse’s slip, and how pleased she
+had been about it. She got up early the morning of the first day
+and made herself a lawn cap and telephoned out for a white nurse’s
+uniform--that is, of course, for a white uniform for a nurse. She really
+looked very fetching, and she went around all the morning with a red
+cross on her sleeve and a Saint Cecilia expression, gathering up bottles
+of medicine--most of it flesh reducer, which was pathetic, and closing
+windows for fear of drafts. She refused to help with the house work, and
+looked quite exalted, but by afternoon it had palled on her somewhat,
+and she and Max shook dice.
+
+Betty was really pleased when Aunt Selina sent for her. She took in a
+bottle of cologne to bathe her brow, and we all stood outside the door
+and listened. Betty tiptoed in in her pretty cap and apron, and we heard
+her cautiously draw down the shades.
+
+“What are you doing that for?” Aunt Selina demanded. “I like the light.”
+
+“It’s bad for your poor eyes,” Betty’s tone was exactly the proper
+bedside pitch, low and sugary.
+
+“Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea!” Dal hummed
+outside.
+
+“Put up those window shades!” Aunt Selina’s voice was strong enough.
+“What’s in that bottle?”
+
+Betty was still mild. She swished to the window and raised the shade.
+
+“I’m SO sorry you are ill,” she said sympathetically. “This is for your
+poor aching head. Now close your eyes and lie perfectly still, and I
+will cool your forehead.”
+
+“There’s nothing the matter with my head,” Aunt Selina retorted. “And
+I have not lost my faculties; I am not a child or a sick cow. If that’s
+perfumery, take it out.”
+
+We heard Betty coming to the door, but there was no time to get away.
+She had dropped her mask for a minute and was biting her lip, but when
+she saw us she forced a smile.
+
+“She’s ill, poor dear,” she said. “If you people will go away, I can
+bring her around all right. In two hours she will eat out of my hand.”
+
+“Eat a piece out of your hand,” Max scoffed in a whisper.
+
+We waited a little longer, but it was too painful. Aunt Selina demanded
+a mustard foot bath and a hot lemonade and her back rubbed with liniment
+and some strong black tea. And in the intervals she wanted to be read
+to out of the prayer book. And when we had all gone away, there came the
+most terrible noise from Aunt Selina’s room, and every one ran. We found
+Betty in the hall outside the door, crying, with her fingers in her ears
+and her cap over her eye. She said she had been putting the hot water
+bottle to Aunt Selina’s back, and it had been too hot. Just then
+something hit against the door with a soft thud, fell to the floor and
+burst, for a trickle of hot water came over the sill.
+
+“She won’t let me hold her hand,” Betty wailed, “or bathe her brow, or
+smooth her pillow. She thinks of nothing but her stomach or her back!
+And when I try to make her bed look decent, she spits at me like a cat.
+Everything I do is wrong. She spilled the foot bath into her shoes, and
+blamed me for it.”
+
+It took the united efforts of all of us--except Bella, who stood back
+and smiled nastily--to get Betty back into the sick room again. I was
+supremely thankful by that time that I had not drawn the nurse’s slip.
+With dinner ordered in from one of the clubs, and the omelet ten hours
+behind me, my position did not seem so unbearable. But a new development
+was coming.
+
+While Betty was fussing with Aunt Selina, Max led a search of the house.
+He said the necklace and the bracelet must be hidden somewhere, and that
+no crevice was too small to neglect.
+
+We made a formal search all together, except Betty and Aunt Selina,
+and we found a lot of things in different places that Jim said had been
+missing since the year one. But no jewels--nothing even suggesting a
+jewel was found. We had explored the entire house, every cupboard,
+every chest, even the insides of the couches and the pockets of Jim’s
+clothes--which he resented bitterly--and found nothing, and I must
+say the situation was growing rather strained. Some one had taken the
+jewels; they hadn’t walked away.
+
+It was Flannigan who suggested the roof, and as we had tried every place
+else, we climbed there. Of course we didn’t find anything, but after all
+day in the house with the shutters closed on account of reporters, the
+air was glorious. It was February, but quite mild and sunny, and we
+could look down over Riverside Drive and the Hudson, and even recognize
+people we knew on horseback and in cars. It was a pathetic joy, and we
+lined up along the parapet and watched the motor boats racing on the
+river, and tried to feel that we were in the world as well as of it, but
+it was very hard.
+
+Betty had been making tea for Aunt Selina, and of course when she heard
+us up there, she followed, tray and all, and we drank Aunt Selina’s tea
+and had the first really nice time of the day. Bella had come up, too,
+but she was still standoffish and queer, and she stood leaning against a
+chimney and staring out over the river. After a little Mr. Harbison put
+down his cup and went over to her, and they talked quite confidentially
+for a long time. I thought it bad taste in Bella, under the
+circumstances, after snubbing Dallas and Max, and of course treating Jim
+like the dirt under her feet, to turn right around and be lovely to Mr.
+Harbison. It was hard for Jim.
+
+Max came and sat beside me, and Flannigan, who had been sent down for
+more cups, passed tea, putting the tray on top of the chimney. Jim was
+sitting grumpily on the roof, with his feet folded under him, playing
+Canfield in the shadow of the parapet, buying the deck out of one pocket
+and putting his winnings in the other. He was watching Bella, too, and
+she knew it, and she strained a point to captivate Mr. Harbison. Any one
+could see that.
+
+And that was the picture that came out in the next morning’s papers,
+tea cups, cards and all. For when some one looked up, there were four
+newspaper photographers on the roof of the next house, and they had the
+impertinence to thank us!
+
+Flannigan had seen Bella by that time, but as he still didn’t understand
+the situation, things were just the same. But his manner to me puzzled
+me; whenever he came near me he winked prodigiously, and during all the
+search he kept one eye on me, and seemed to be amused about something.
+
+When the rest had gone down to dress for dinner, which was being sent
+in, thank goodness, I still sat on the parapet and watched the darkening
+river. I felt terribly lonely, all at once, and sad. There wasn’t any
+one any nearer than father, in the West, or mother in Bermuda, who
+really cared a rap whether I sat on that parapet all night or not,
+or who would be sorry if I leaped to the dirty bricks of the next
+door-yard--not that I meant to, of course.
+
+The lights came out across the river, and made purple and yellow streaks
+on the water, and one of the motor boats came panting back to the yacht
+club, coughing and gasping as if it had overdone. Down on the street
+automobiles were starting and stopping, cabs rolling, doors slamming,
+all the maddening, delightful bustle of people who are foot-free to
+dine out, to dance, to go to the theater, to do any of the thousand
+possibilities of a long February evening. And above them I sat on the
+roof and cried. Yes, cried.
+
+I was roused by some one coughing just behind me, and I tried to
+straighten my face before I turned. It was Flannigan, his double row of
+brass buttons gleaming in the twilight.
+
+“Excuse me, miss,” he said affably, “but the boy from the hotel has left
+the dinner on the doorstep and run, the cowardly little divil! What’ll
+I do with it? I went to Mrs. Wilson, but she says it’s no concern of
+hers.” Flannigan was evidently bewildered.
+
+“You’d better keep it warm, Flannigan,” I replied. “You needn’t wait;
+I’m coming.” But he did not go.
+
+“If--if you’ll excuse me, miss,” he said, “don’t you think ye’d betther
+tell them?”
+
+“Tell them what?”
+
+“The whole thing--the joke,” he said confidentially, coming closer.
+“It’s been great sport, now, hasn’t it? But I’m afraid they will get on
+to it soon, and--some of them might not be agreeable. A pearl necklace
+is a pearl necklace, miss, and the lady’s wild.”
+
+“What do you mean?” I gasped. “You don’t think--why, Flannigan--”
+
+He merely grinned at me and thrust his hand down in his pocket. When
+he brought it up he had Bella’s bracelet on his palm, glittering in the
+faint light.
+
+“Where did you get it?” Between relief and the absurdity of the thing,
+I was almost hysterical. But Flannigan did not give me the bracelet;
+instead, it struck me his tone was suddenly severe.
+
+“Now look here, miss,” he said; “you’ve played your trick, and you’ve
+had your fun. The Lord knows it’s only folks like you would play April
+fool jokes with a fortune! If you’re the sinsible little woman you look
+to be, you’ll put that pearl collar on the coal in the basement tonight,
+and let me find it.”
+
+“I haven’t got the pearl collar,” I protested. “I think you are crazy.
+Where did you get that bracelet?”
+
+He edged away from me, as if he expected me to snatch it from him and
+run, but he was still trying in an elephantine way to treat the matter
+as a joke.
+
+“I found it in a drawer in the pantry,” he said, “among the dirty linen.
+And if you’re as smart as I think you are, I’ll find the pearl collar
+there in the morning--and nothing said, miss.”
+
+So there I was, suspected of being responsible for Anne’s pearl collar,
+as if I had not enough to worry me before. Of course I could have called
+them all together and told them, and made them explain to Flannigan what
+I had really meant by my delirious speech in the kitchen. But that
+would have meant telling the whole ridiculous story to Mr. Harbison, and
+having him think us all mad, and me a fool.
+
+In all that overcrowded house there was only one place where I could be
+miserable with comfort. So I stayed on the roof, and cried a little
+and then became angry and walked up and down, and clenched my hands
+and babbled helplessly. The boats on the river were yellow, horizontal
+streaks through my tears, and an early searchlight sent its shaft like
+a tangible thing in the darkness, just over my head. Then, finally,
+I curled down in a corner with my arms on the parapet, and the lights
+became more and more prismatic and finally formed themselves into a
+circle that was Bella’s bracelet, and that kept whirling around and
+around on something flat and not over-clean, that was Flannigan’s palm.
+
+
+
+Chapter X. ON THE STAIRS
+
+I was roused by someone walking across the roof, the cracking of tin
+under feet, and a comfortable and companionable odor of tobacco. I
+moved a very little, and then I saw that it was a man--the height and
+erectness told me which man. And just at that instant he saw me.
+
+“Good Lord!” he ejaculated, and throwing his cigar away he came across
+quickly. “Why, Mrs. Wilson, what in the world are you doing here? I
+thought--they said--”
+
+“That I was sulking again?” I finished disagreeably. “Perhaps I am. In
+fact, I’m quite sure of it.”
+
+“You are not,” he said severely. “You have been asleep in a February
+night, in the open air, with less clothing on than I wear in the
+tropics.”
+
+I had got up by this time, refusing his help, and because my feet were
+numb, I sat down on the parapet for a moment. Oh, I knew what I looked
+like--one of those “Valley-of-the-Nile-After-a-Flood” pictures.
+
+“There is one thing about you that is comforting,” I sniffed. “You said
+precisely the same thing to me at three o’clock this morning. You never
+startle me by saying anything unexpected.”
+
+He took a step toward me, and even in the dusk I could see that he was
+looking down at me oddly. All my bravado faded away and there was a
+queerish ringing in my ears.
+
+“I would like to!” he said tensely. “I would like, this minute--I’m
+a fool, Mrs. Wilson,” he finished miserably. “I ought to be drawn and
+quartered, but when I see you like this I--I get crazy. If you say the
+word, I’ll--I’ll go down and--” He clenched his fist.
+
+It was reprehensible, of course; he saw that in an instant, for he shut
+his teeth over something that sounded very fierce, and strode away from
+me, to stand looking out over the river, with his hands thrust in his
+pockets. Of course the thing I should have done was to ignore what he
+had said altogether, but he was so uncomfortable, so chastened, that,
+feline, feminine, whatever the instinct is, I could not let him go. I
+had been so wretched myself.
+
+“What is it you would like to say?” I called over to him. He did not
+speak. “Would you tell me that I am a silly child for pouting?” No
+reply; he struck a match. “Or would you preach a nice little sermon
+about people--about women--loving their husbands?”
+
+He grunted savagely under his breath.
+
+“Be quite honest,” I pursued relentlessly. “Say that we are a lot
+of barbarians, say that because my--because Jimmy treats me
+outrageously--oh, he does; any one can see that--and because I loathe
+him--and any one can tell that--why don’t you say you are shocked to
+the depths?” I was a little shocked myself by that time, but I couldn’t
+stop, having started.
+
+He came over to me, white-faced and towering, and he had the audacity
+to grip my arm and stand me on my feet, like a bad child--which I was, I
+dare say.
+
+“Don’t!” he said in a husky, very pained voice. “You are only talking;
+you don’t mean it. It isn’t YOU. You know you care, or else why are you
+crying up here? And don’t do it again, DON’T DO IT AGAIN--or I will--”
+
+“You will--what?”
+
+“Make a fool of myself, as I have now,” he finished grimly. And then he
+stalked away and left me there alone, completely bewildered, to find my
+way down in the dark.
+
+I groped along, holding to the rail, for the staircase to the roof was
+very steep, and I went slowly. Half-way down the stairs there was a
+tiny landing, and I stopped. I could have sworn I heard Mr. Harbison’s
+footsteps far below, growing fainter. I even smiled a little, there in
+the dark, although I had been rather profoundly shaken. The next instant
+I knew I had been wrong; some one was on the landing with me. I could
+hear short, sharp breathing, and then--
+
+I am not sure that I struggled; in fact, I don’t believe I did--I was
+too limp with amazement. The creature, to have lain in wait for me like
+that! And he was brutally strong; he caught me to him fiercely, and held
+me there, close, and he kissed me--not once or twice, but half a dozen
+times, long kisses that filled me with hot shame for him, for myself,
+that I had--liked him. The roughness of his coat bruised my cheek; I
+loathed him. And then someone came whistling along the hall below, and
+he pushed me from him and stood listening, breathing in long, gasping
+breaths.
+
+I ran; when my shaky knees would hold me, I ran. I wanted to hide my hot
+face, my disgust, my disillusion; I wanted to put my head in mother’s
+lap and cry; I wanted to die, or be ill, so I need never see him again.
+Perversely enough, I did none of those things. With my face still
+flaming, with burning eyes and hands that shook, I made a belated
+evening toilet and went slowly, haughtily, down the stairs. My hands
+were like ice, but I was consumed with rage. Oh, I would show him--that
+this was New York, not Iquique; that the roof was not his Andean
+tableland.
+
+Every one elaborately ignored my absence from dinner. The Dallas Browns,
+Max and Lollie were at bridge; Jim was alone in the den, walking the
+floor and biting at an unlighted cigar; Betty had returned to Aunt
+Selina and was hysterical, they said, and Flannigan was in deep
+dejection because I had missed my dinner.
+
+“Betty is making no end of a row,” Max said, looking up from his game,
+“because the old lady upstairs insists on chloroform liniment. Betty
+says the smell makes her ill.”
+
+“And she can inhale Russian cigarettes,” Anne said enviously, “and
+gasolene fumes, without turning a hair. I call a revoke, Dal; you
+trumped spades on the second round.”
+
+Dal flung over three tricks with very bad grace, and Anne counted them
+with maddening deliberation.
+
+“Game and rubber,” she said. “Watch Dal, Max; he will cheat in the score
+if he can. Kit, don’t have another clam while I am in this house. I have
+eaten so many lately my waist rises and falls with the tide.”
+
+“You have a stunning color, Kit,” Lollie said. “You are really quite
+superb. Who made that gown?”
+
+“Where have you been hiding, du kleine?” Max whispered, under cover of
+showing me the evening paper, with a photograph of the house and a cross
+at the cellar window where we had tried to escape. “If one day in the
+house with you, Kit, puts me in this condition, what will a month do?”
+
+From beyond the curtain of a sort of alcove, lighted with a red-shaded
+lamp, came a hum of conversation, Bella’s cool, even tones, and a heavy
+masculine voice. They were laughing; I could feel my chin go up. He was
+not even hiding his shame.
+
+“Max,” I asked, while the others clamored for him and the game, “has any
+one been up through the house since dinner? Any of the men?”
+
+He looked at me curiously.
+
+“Only Harbison,” he replied promptly. “Jim has been eating his heart
+out in the den every since dinner; Dal played the Sonata Appasionata
+backward on the pianola--he wanted to put through one of Anne’s lingerie
+waists, on a wager that it would play a tune; I played craps with
+Lollie, and Flannigan has been washing dishes. Why?”
+
+Well, that was conclusive, anyhow. I had had a faint hope that it might
+have been a joke, although it had borne all the evidences of sincerity,
+certainly. But it was past doubting now; he had lain in wait for me at
+the landing, and had kissed me, ME, when he thought I was Jimmy’s wife.
+Oh, I must have been very light, very contemptible, if that was what he
+thought of me!
+
+I went into the library and got a book, but it was impossible to read,
+with Jimmy lying on the couch giving vent to something between a sigh
+and a groan every few minutes. About eleven the cards stopped, and Bella
+said she would read palms. She began with Mr. Harbison, because she
+declared he had a wonderful hand, full of possibilities; she said he
+should have been a great inventor or a playwright, and that his attitude
+to women was one of homage, respect, almost reverence. He had the
+courage to look at me, and if a glance could have killed he would have
+withered away.
+
+When Jimmy proffered his hand, she looked at it icily. Of course she
+could not refuse, with Mr. Harbison looking on.
+
+“Rather negative,” she said coldly. “The lines are obscured by cushions
+of flesh; no heart line at all, mentality small, self-indulgence and
+irritability very marked.”
+
+Jim held his palm up to the light and stared at it.
+
+“Gad!” he said. “Hardly safe for me to go around without gloves, is it?”
+
+It was all well enough for Jim to laugh, but he was horribly hurt. He
+stood around for a few minutes, talking to Anne, but as soon as he could
+he slid away and went to bed. He looked very badly the next morning,
+as though he had not slept, and his clothes quite hung on him. He was
+actually thinner. But that is ahead of the story.
+
+Max came to me while the others were sitting around drinking nightcaps,
+and asked me in a low tone if he could see me in the den; he wanted to
+ask me something. Dal overheard.
+
+“Ask her here,” he said. “We all know what it is, Max. Go ahead and
+we’ll coach you.”
+
+“Will you coach ME?” I asked, for Mr. Harbison was listening.
+
+“The woman does not need it,” Dal retorted. And then, because Max looked
+angry enough really to propose to me right there, I got up hastily and
+went into the den. Max followed, and closing the door, stood with his
+back against it.
+
+“Contrary to the general belief, Kit,” he began, “I did NOT intend to
+ask you to marry me.”
+
+I breathed easier. He took a couple of steps toward me and stood with
+his arms folded, looking down at me. “I’m not at all sure, in fact, that
+I shall ever propose to you,” he went on unpleasantly.
+
+“You have already done it twice. You are not going to take those back,
+are you, Max?” I asked, looking up at him.
+
+But Max was not to be cajoled. He came close and stood with his hand on
+the back of my chair. “What happened on the roof tonight?” He demanded
+hoarsely.
+
+“I do not think it would interest you,” I retorted, coloring in spite of
+myself.
+
+“Not interest me! I am shut in this blasted house; I have to see the
+only woman I ever loved--REALLY loved,” he supplemented, as he caught my
+eye, “pretend she is another man’s wife. Then I sit back and watch her
+using every art--all her beauty--to make still another man love her,
+a man who thinks she is a married woman. If Harbison were worth the
+trouble, I would tell him the whole story, Aunt Selina be--obliterated!”
+
+I sat up suddenly.
+
+“If Harbison were worth the trouble!” I repeated. What did he mean? Had
+he seen--
+
+“I mean just this,” Max said slowly. “There is only one unaccredited
+member of this household; only one person, save Flannigan, who was
+locked in the furnace room, one person who was awake and around the
+house when Anne’s jewels went, only one person in the house, also, who
+would have any motive for the theft.”
+
+“Motive?” I asked dully.
+
+“Poverty,” Max threw at me. “Oh, I mean comparative poverty, of course.
+Who is this fellow, anyhow? Dal knew him at school, traveled with him
+through India. On the strength of that he brings him here, quarters him
+with decent people, and wonders when they are systematically robbed!”
+
+“You are unjust!” I said, rising and facing him. “I do not like Mr.
+Harbison--I--I hate him, if you want to know. But as to his being a
+thief, I--think it is quite as likely that you took the necklace.”
+
+Max threw his cigarette into the fire angrily.
+
+“So that is how it is!” he mocked. “If either of us is the thief, it is
+I! You DO hate him, don’t you?”
+
+I left him there, flushed with irritation, and joined the others. Just
+as I entered the room, Betty burst through the hall door like a cyclone,
+and collapsed into a chair. “She’s a mean, cantankerous old woman!” she
+declared, feeling for her handkerchief. “You can take care of your own
+Aunt Selina, Jim Wilson. I will never go near her again.”
+
+“What did you do? Poison her?” Dallas asked with interest.
+
+“G--got camphor in her eyes,” snuffed Betty. “You never--heard such a
+noise. I wouldn’t be a trained nurse for anything in the world. She--she
+called me a hussy!”
+
+“You’re not going to give her up, are you, Betty?” Jim asked
+imploringly. But Betty was, and said so plainly.
+
+“Anyhow, she won’t have me back,” she finished, “and she has sent
+for--guess!”
+
+“Have mercy!” Dal cried, dropping to his knees. “Oh, fair ministering
+angel, she has not sent for me!”
+
+“No,” Betty said maliciously. “She wants Bella--she’s crazy about her.”
+
+
+
+Chapter XI. I MAKE A DISCOVERY
+
+Really, I have left Aunt Selina rather out of it, but she was important
+as a cause, not as a result; at least at first. She came out strong
+later. I believe she was a very nice old woman, with strong likes and
+prejudices, which she was perfectly willing to pay for. At least, I only
+presume she had likes; I know she had prejudices.
+
+Nobody every understood why Bella consented to take Betty’s place with
+Aunt Selina. As for me, I was too much engrossed with my own affairs
+to pay the invalid much attention. Once or twice during the day I had
+stopped in to see her, and had been received frigidly and with marked
+disapproval. I was in disgrace, of course, after the scene in the dining
+room the night before. I had stood like a naughty child, just inside the
+door, and replied meekly when she said the pillows were overstuffed, and
+why didn’t I have the linen slips rinsed in starch water? She laid the
+blame of her illness on me, as I have said before, and she made Jim read
+to her in the afternoon from a book she carried with her, Coals of Fire
+on the DOMESTIC Hearth, marking places for me to read.
+
+She sent for me that night, just as I had taken off my gown; so I threw
+on a dressing gown and went in. To my horror, Jim was already there. At
+a gesture from Aunt Selina, he closed the door into the hall and tiptoed
+back beside the bed, where he sat staring at the figures on the silk
+comfort.
+
+Aunt Selina’s first words were:
+
+“Where’s that flibberty-gibbet?”
+
+Jim looked at me.
+
+“She must mean Betty,” I explained. “She has gone to bed, I think.”
+
+“Don’t--let--her--in--this--room--again,” she said, with awful emphasis.
+“She is an infamous creature.”
+
+“Oh, come now, Aunt Selina,” Jim broke in; “she’s foolish, perhaps, but
+she’s a nice little thing.”
+
+Aunt Selina’s face was a curious study. Then she raised herself on her
+elbow, and, taking a flat chamois-skin bag from under her pillow, held
+it out.
+
+“My cameo breastpin,” she said solemnly; “my cuff-buttons with gold rims
+and storks painted on china in the middle; my watch, that has put me to
+bed and got me up for forty years, and my money--five hundred and ten
+dollars and forty cents!--taken with the doors locked under my nose.”
+ Which was ambiguous, but forcible.
+
+“But, good gracious, Miss Car--Aunt Selina!” I exclaimed, “you don’t
+think Betty Mercer took those things?”
+
+“No,” she said grimly; “I think I probably got up in my sleep and
+lighted the fire with them, or sent em out for a walk.” Then she stuffed
+the bag away and sat up resolutely in bed.
+
+“Have you made up?” she demanded, looking from one to the other of us.
+“Bella, don’t tell me you still persist in that nonsense.”
+
+“What nonsense?” I asked, getting ready to run.
+
+“That you do not love him.”
+
+“Him?”
+
+“James,” she snapped irritably. “Do you suppose I mean the policeman?”
+
+I looked over at Jimmy. She had got me by the hand, and Jimmy was making
+frantic gestures to tell her the whole thing and be done with it. But
+I had gone too far. The mill of the gods had crushed me already, and
+I didn’t propose to be drawn out hideously mangled and held up as an
+example for the next two or three weeks, although it was clear enough
+that Aunt Selina disapproved of me thoroughly, and would have been glad
+enough to find that no tie save the board of health held us together.
+And then Bella came in, and you wouldn’t have known her. She had put on
+a straight white woolen wrapper, and she had her hair in two long braids
+down her back. She looked like a nice, wide-eyed little girl in her
+teens, and she had some lobster salad and a glass of port on a tray.
+When she saw the situation, she put the things down and had the
+nastiness to stay and listen.
+
+“I’m not blind,” Aunt Selina said, with one eye on the tray. “You two
+silly children adore each other; I saw some things last night.”
+
+Bella took a step forward; then she stopped and shrugged her shoulders.
+Jim was purple.
+
+“I saw you kiss her in the dining room, remember that!” Aunt Selina went
+on, giving the screw another turn.
+
+It was Bella’s turn to be excited. She gave me one awful stare, then she
+fixed her eyes on Jim.
+
+“Besides,” Aunt Selina went on, “you told me today that you loved her.
+Don’t deny it, James.”
+
+Bella couldn’t keep quiet another instant. She came over and stood at
+the foot of the bed.
+
+“Please don’t excite yourself, DEAR Miss Caruthers,” she said in a voice
+like ice. “Every one knows that he loves her; he simply overflows
+with it. It--it is quite a by-word among their friends. They have been
+sitting together in a corner all evening.”
+
+Yes, that was what she said; when I had not spoken to Jimmy the whole
+time in the den. Bella was cattish, and she was jealous, too. I turned
+on my heel and went to the door; then I turned to her, with my hand on
+the knob.
+
+“You have been misinformed,” I said coldly. “You can not possibly know,
+having spent three hours in a corner yourself--with Mr. Harbison.” I
+abhor jealousy in a woman.
+
+Well, Aunt Selina ate all the lobster salad, and drank the port after
+Bella had told her it was beef, iron and wine, and she slept all night,
+and was able to sit up in a chair the next day, and was so infatuated
+with Bella that she would not let her out of her sight. But that is
+ahead of the story.
+
+At midnight the house was fairly quiet, except for Jim, who kept walking
+around the halls because he couldn’t sleep. I got up at last and ordered
+him to bed, and he had the audacity to have a grievance with me.
+
+“Look at my situation now!” he said, sitting pensively on a steam
+radiator. “Aunt Selina is crazy. I only kissed your hand, anyhow, and I
+don’t know why you sat in the den all evening; you might have known that
+Bella would notice it. Why couldn’t you leave me alone to my misery?”
+
+“Very well,” I said, much offended. “After this I shall sit with
+Flannigan in the kitchen. He is the only gentleman in the house.”
+
+I left him babbling apologies and went to bed, but I had an
+uncomfortable feeling that Bella had been a witness to our conversation,
+for the door into Aunt Selina’s room closed softly as I passed.
+
+I knew beforehand that I was not going to sleep. The instant I turned
+out the light the nightmare events of the evening ranged themselves in
+a procession, or a series of tableaus, one after the other; Flannigan on
+the roof, with the bracelet on his palm, looking accusingly at me; Mr.
+Harbison and the scene on the roof, with my flippancy; and the result
+of that flippancy--the man on the stairs, the arms that held me, the
+terrible kisses that had scorched my lips--it was awful! And then the
+absurd situation across Aunt Selina’s bed, and Bella’s face! Oh, it
+was all so ridiculous--my having thought that the Harbison man was
+a gentleman, and finding him a cad, and worse. It was excruciatingly
+funny. I quite got a headache from laughing; indeed I laughed until I
+found I was crying, and then I knew I was going to have an attack of
+strangulated emotion, called hysteria. So I got up and turned on all the
+lights, and bathed my face with cologne, and felt better.
+
+But I did not go to sleep. When the hall clock chimed two, I discovered
+I was hungry. I had had nothing since luncheon, and even the thirst
+following the South American goulash was gone. There was probably
+something to eat in the pantry, and if there was not, I was quite equal
+to going to the basement.
+
+As it happened, however, I found a very orderly assortment of left-overs
+and a pitcher of milk, which had no business there in the pantry, and
+with plenty of light I was not at all frightened.
+
+I ate bread and butter and drank milk, and was fast becoming a rational
+person again; I had pulled out one of the drawers part way, and with a
+tray across the corner I had improvised a comfortable seat. And then I
+noticed that the drawer was full of soiled napkins, and I remembered the
+bracelet. I hardly know why I decided to go through the drawer again,
+after Flannigan had already done it, but I did. I finished my milk and
+then, getting down on my knees, I proceeded systematically to empty the
+drawer. I took out perhaps a dozen napkins and as many doilies without
+finding anything. Then I took out a large tray cloth, and there was
+something on it that made me look farther. One corner of it had been
+scorched, the clear and well defined imprint of a lighted cigarette or
+cigar, a blackened streak that trailed off into a brown and yellow.
+I had a queer, trembly feeling, as if I were on the brink of a
+discovery--perhaps Anne’s pearls, or the cuff buttons with storks
+painted on china in the center. But the only thing I found, down in the
+corner of the drawer, was a half-burned cigarette.
+
+To me, it seemed quite enough. It was one of the South American
+cigarettes, with a tobacco wrapper instead of paper, that Mr. Harbison
+smoked.
+
+
+
+Chapter XII. THE ROOF GARDEN
+
+I was quite ill the next morning--from excitement, I suppose. Anyhow,
+I did not get up, and there wasn’t any breakfast. Jim said he roused
+Flannigan at eight o’clock, to go down and get the fire started, and
+then went back to bed. But Flannigan did not get up. He appeared,
+sheepishly, at half-past ten, and by that time Bella was down, in a
+towering rage, and had burned her hand and got the fire started, and had
+taken up a tray for Aunt Selina and herself.
+
+As the others straggled down they boiled themselves eggs or ate fruit,
+and nobody put anything away. Lollie Mercer made me some tea and
+scorched toast, and brought it, about eleven o’clock.
+
+“I never saw such a house,” she declared. “A dozen housemaids couldn’t
+put it in order. Why should every man that smokes drop ashes wherever he
+happens to be?”
+
+“That’s the question of the ages,” I replied languidly. “What was
+Max talking so horribly about a little while ago?” Lollie looked up
+aggrieved.
+
+“About nothing at all,” she declared. “Anne told me to clean the bath
+tubs with oil, and I did it, that’s all. Now Max says he couldn’t get it
+off, and his clothes stick to him, and if he should forget and strike a
+match in the--in the usual way, he would explode. He can clean his own
+tub tomorrow,” she finished vindictively.
+
+At noon Jim came in to see me, bringing Anne as a concession to Bella.
+He was in a rage, and he carried the morning paper like a club in his
+hand.
+
+“What sort of a newspaper lie would you call this?” he demanded
+irritably. “It makes me crazy; everybody with a mental image of me
+leaning over the parapet of the roof, waving a board, with the rest of
+you sitting on my legs to keep me from overbalancing!”
+
+“Maybe there’s a picture!” Anne said hopefully.
+
+Jim looked.
+
+“No picture,” he announced. “I wonder why they restrained themselves!
+I wish Bella would keep off the roof,” he added, with fresh access
+of rage, “or wear a mask or veil. One of those fellows is going to
+recognize her, and there’ll be the deuce to pay.”
+
+“When you are all through discussing this thing, perhaps you will tell
+me what is the matter,” I remarked from my couch. “Why did you lean over
+the parapet, Jim, and who sat on your legs?”
+
+“I didn’t; nobody did,” he retorted, waving the newspaper. “It’s a
+lie out of the whole cloth, that’s what it is. I asked you girls to
+be decent to those reporters; it never pays to offend a newspaper man.
+Listen to this, Kit.”
+
+He read the article rapidly, furiously, pausing every now and then to
+make an exasperated comment.
+
+ATTEMPT AT ESCAPE FRUSTRATED MEMBERS OF THE FOUR HUNDRED DEFY THE LAW
+
+“Special Officer McCloud, on duty at the quarantined house of James
+Wilson, artist and clubman, on Ninety-fifth Street, reported this
+morning a daring attempt at escape, made at 3 A.M. It is in this house
+that some eight or nine members of the smart set were imprisoned
+during the course of a dinner party, when the Japanese butler developed
+smallpox. The party shut in the house includes Miss Katherine McNair,
+the daughter of Theodore McNair, of the Inter-Ocean system; Mr. and Mrs.
+Dallas Brown; the Misses Mercer; Maxwell Reed, the well-known clubman
+and whip; and a Mr. Thomas Harbison, guest of the Dallas Browns and a
+South American.
+
+“Officer McCloud’s story, told to a Chronicle reporter this morning, is
+as follows: The occupants of the house had been uneasy all day. From the
+air of subdued bustle, and from a careful inspection of the roof,
+made by the entire party during the afternoon, his suspicion had been
+aroused. Nothing unusual, however, occurred during the early part of the
+night. From eight o’clock to twelve, McCloud was relieved from duty, his
+place being taken by Michael Shane, of the Eighty-sixth Street Station.
+
+“When McCloud came on duty at midnight, Shane reported that about eleven
+o’clock the searchlight of a steamer on the river, flashing over the
+house, had shown a man crouching on the parapet, evidently surveying
+the roof across, which at this point is only twelve feet distant, with a
+view of making his escape. One seeing Shane below, however, he had beat
+a retreat, but not before the officer had seen him distinctly. He was
+dressed in evening clothes and wore a light tan overcoat.
+
+“Officer McCloud relieved Shane at midnight, and sent for a
+plain-clothes man from the station house. This man was stationed on the
+roof of the Bevington residence next door, with strict injunctions
+to prevent an escape from the quarantined mansion. Nothing suspicious
+having occurred, the man on the roof left about 3 A.M., reporting
+to McCloud below that everything was quiet. At that moment, glancing
+skyward, one of the officers was astounded to see a long narrow board
+project itself from the coping of the Wildon house, waver uncertainly
+for a moment, and then advance stealthily toward the parapet across.
+When it was within a foot or two of a resting place, McCloud called
+sharply to the invisible refugee above, at the same time firing his
+revolver in the ground.
+
+“The result was surprising. The board stopped, trembled, swayed a
+little, and dropped, missing the vigilant officers by a hair’s breadth,
+and crashing to the cement with a terrific force. An inspection of the
+roof from the Bevington house, later, revealed nothing unusual. It
+is evident, however, that the quarantine is proving irksome to the
+inhabitants of the sequestered residence, most of whom are typical
+society folk, without resources in themselves. Their condition, without
+valets and maids, is certainly pitiable. It has been rumored that
+the ladies are doing their own hair, and that the gentlemen have been
+reduced to putting their own buttons in their shirts. This deplorable
+situation, however, is unavoidable.
+
+“The vigilance of the board of health has been most commendable in this
+case. Beginning with a wager over the telephone that they would break
+quarantine in twenty-four hours, and ending with the attempt to span
+a twelve-foot gulf with a board, over which to cross to freedom, these
+shut-in society folk have shown characteristic disregard of the laws
+of the state. It is quite time to extend to the millionaire the same
+strictness that keeps the commuter at home for three weeks with the
+measles; that makes him get the milk bottles and groceries from the
+gate post and smell like dog soap for a month afterward, as a result of
+disinfection.’”
+
+We sat in dead silence for a minute. Then:
+
+“Perhaps it is true,” I said. “Not of you, Jim--but some one may have
+tried to get out that way. In fact, I think it extremely likely.”
+
+“Who? Flannigan? You couldn’t drive him out. He’s having the time of his
+life. Do you suspect me?”
+
+“Come away and don’t fight,” Anne broke in pacifically. “You will have
+to have luncheon sent in, Jimmy; nobody has ordered anything from the
+shops, and I feel like old Mother Hubbard.”
+
+“I wish you would all go out,” I said wearily. “If every man in the
+house says he didn’t try to get over to the next roof last night, well
+and good. But you might look and see if the board is still lying where
+it fell.”
+
+There was an instantaneous rush for the window, and a second’s pause.
+Then Jimmy’s voice, incredulous, awed:
+
+“Well, I’ll be--blessed! There’s the board!”
+
+I stayed in my room all that day. My head really ached and then, too,
+I did not care to meet Mr. Harbison. It would have to come; I realized
+that a meeting was inevitable, but I wanted time to think how I would
+meet him. It would be impossible to cut him, without rousing the
+curiosity of the others to fever pitch; and it was equally impossible to
+ignore the disgraceful episode on the stairs. As it happened, however, I
+need not have worried. I went down to dinner, languidly, when every
+one was seated, and found Max at my right, and Mr. Harbison moved over
+beside Bella. Every one was talking at once, for Flannigan, ambling
+around the table as airily as he walked his beat, had presented Bella
+with her bracelet on a salad plate, garnished with romaine. He had found
+it in the furnace room, he said, where she must have dropped it. And he
+looked at me stealthily, to approve his mendacity!
+
+Every one was famished, and as they ate they discussed the board in the
+area way, and pretended to deride it as a clever bit of press work, to
+revive a dying sensation. No one was deceived; Anne’s pearls and the
+attempt to escape, coming just after, pointed only to one thing. I
+looked around the table, dazed. Flannigan, almost the only unknown
+quantity, might have tried to escape the night before, but he would not
+have been in dress clothes. Besides, he must be eliminated as far as the
+pearls were concerned, having been locked in the furnace room the night
+they were stolen. There was no one among the girls to suspect. The
+Mercer girls had stunning pearls, and could secure all they wanted
+legitimately; and Bella disliked them. Oh, there was no question about
+it, I decided; Dallas and Anne had taken a wolf to their bosom--or is
+it a viper?--and the Harbison man was the creature. Although I must say
+that, looking over the table, at Jimmy’s breadth and not very imposing
+personality, at Max’s lean length, sallow skin, and bold dark eyes, at
+Dallas, blond, growing bald and florid, and then at the Harbison boy,
+tall, muscular, clear-eyed and sunburned, one would have taken Max at
+first choice as the villain, with Dal next, Jim third, and the Harbison
+boy not in the running.
+
+It was just after dinner that the surprise was sprung on me. Mr.
+Harbison came around to me gravely, and asked me if I felt able to go
+up on the roof. On the roof, after last night! I had to gather myself
+together; luckily, the others were pushing back their chairs, showing
+Flannigan the liqueur glasses to take up, and lighting cigars.
+
+“I do not care to go,” I said icily.
+
+“The others are coming,” he persisted, “and I--I could give you an arm
+up the stairs.”
+
+“I believe you are good at that,” I said, looking at him steadily. “Max,
+will you help me to the roof?”
+
+Mr. Harbison really turned rather white. Then he bowed ceremoniously and
+left me.
+
+Max got me a wrap, and every one except Mr. Harbison and Bella, who was
+taking a mass of indigestables to Aunt Selina, went to the roof.
+
+“Where is Tom?” Anne asked, as we reached the foot of the stairs. “Gone
+ahead to fix things,” was the answer. But he was not there. At the top
+of the last flight I stopped, dumb with amazement; the roof had been
+transformed, enchanted. It was a fairy-land of lights and foliage and
+colors. I had to stop and rub my eyes. From the bleakness of a tin roof
+in February to the brightness and greenery of a July roof garden!
+
+“You were the immediate inspiration, Kit,” Dallas said. “Harbison
+thought your headache might come from lack of exercise and fresh air,
+and he has worked us like nailers all day. I’ve a blister on my right
+palm, and Harbison got shocked while he was wiring the place, and
+nearly fell over the parapet. We bought out two full-sized florists by
+telephone.”
+
+It was the most amazing transformation. At each corner a pole had been
+erected, and wires crossed the roof diagonally, hung with red and amber
+bulbs. Around the chimneys had been massed evergreen trees in tubs,
+hiding their brick-and-mortar ugliness, and among the trees tiny lights
+were strung. Along the parapet were rows of geometrical boxwood plants
+in bright red crocks, and the flaps of a crimson and white tent had
+been thrown open, showing lights within, and rugs, wicker chairs, and
+cushions.
+
+Max raised a glass of benedictine and posed for a moment,
+melodramatically.
+
+“To the Wilson roof garden!” he said. “To Kit, who inspired; to the
+creators, who perspired; and to Takahiro--may he not have expired.”
+
+Every one was very gay; I think the knowledge that tomorrow Aunt Selina
+might be with them urged them to make the most of this last night of
+freedom. I tried to be jolly, and succeeded in being feverish. Mr.
+Harbison did not come up to enjoy what he had wrought. Jim brought up
+his guitar and sang love songs in a beautiful tenor, looking at Bella
+all the time. And Bella sat in a steamer chair, with a rug over her and
+a spangled veil on her head, looking at the boats on the river--about as
+soft and as chastened as an an acetylene headlight.
+
+And after Max had told the most improbable tale, which Leila advised him
+to sprinkle salt on, and Dallas had done a clog dance, Bella said it
+was time for her complexion sleep and went downstairs, and broke up the
+party.
+
+“If she only give half as an much care to her immortal soul,” Anne said
+when she had gone, “as she does to her skin, she would let that nice
+Harbison boy alone. She must have been brutal to him tonight, for he
+went to bed at nine o’clock. At least, I suppose he went to bed, for he
+shut himself in the studio, and when I knocked he advised me not to come
+in.”
+
+I had pleaded my headache as an excuse for avoiding Aunt Selina all day,
+and she had not sent for me. Bella was really quite extraordinary.
+She was never in the habit of putting herself out for any one, and she
+always declared that the very odor of a sick room drove her to Scotch
+and soda. But here she was, rubbing Aunt Selina’s back with chloroform
+liniment--and you know how that smells--getting her up in a chair,
+dressed in one of Bella’s wadded silk robes, with pillows under her
+feet, and then doing her hair in elaborate puffs--braiding her gray
+switch and bringing it, coronet-fashion, around the top of her head.
+She even put rice powder on Aunt Selina’s nose, and dabbed violet water
+behind her ears, and said she couldn’t understand why she (Aunt Selina)
+had never married, but, of course, she probably would some day!
+
+The result was, naturally, that the old lady wouldn’t let Bella out of
+her sight, except to go to the kitchen for something to eat for her.
+That very day Bella got the doctor to order ale for Aunt Selina (oh,
+yes; the doctor could come in; Dal said “it was all a-coming in, and
+nothing going out”) and she had three pints of Bass, and learned to eat
+anchovies and caviare--all in one day.
+
+Bella’s conduct to Jim was disgraceful. She snubbed him, ignored him,
+tramped on him, and Jim was growing positively flabby. He spent most of
+his time writing letters to the board of health and playing solitaire.
+He was a pathetic figure.
+
+Well, we went to bed fairly early. Bella had massaged Aunt Selina’s
+face and rubbed in cold cream, Anne and Dallas had compromised on which
+window should be open in their bedroom, and the men had matched to see
+who should look at the furnace. I did not expect to sleep, but the cold
+night air had done its work, and I was asleep almost immediately.
+
+Some time during the early part of the night I wakened, and, after
+turning and twisting uneasily, I realized that I was cold. The couch
+in Bella’s dressing room was comfortable enough, but narrow and low. I
+remember distinctly (that was what was so maddening; everybody thought I
+dreamed it)--I remember getting an eiderdown comfort that was folded
+at my feet, and pulling it up around me. In the luxury of its warmth I
+snuggled down and went to sleep almost instantly. It seemed to me I had
+slept for hours, but it was probably an hour or less, when something
+roused me. The room was perfectly dark, and there was not a sound save
+the faint ticking of the clock, but I was wide awake.
+
+And then came the incident that in its ghastly, horrible absurdity made
+the rest of the people shout with laughter the next day. It was not
+funny then. For suddenly the eiderdown comfort began to slip. I heard no
+footstep, not the slightest sound approaching me, but the comfort
+moved; from my chin, inch by inch, it slipped to my shoulders; awfully,
+inevitably, hair-raisingly it moved. I could feel my blood gather around
+my heart, leaving me cold and nerveless. As it passed my hands I gave
+an involuntary clutch for it, to feel it slip away from my fingers. Then
+the full horror of the situation took hold of me; as the comfort slid
+past my feet I sat up and screamed at the top of my voice.
+
+Of course, people came running in all sorts of things. I was still
+sitting up, declaring I had seen a ghost and that the house was haunted.
+Dallas was struggling for the second armhole of his dressing gown and
+Bella had already turned on the lights. They said I had had a nightmare,
+and not to sleep on my back, and perhaps I was taking grippe.
+
+And just then we heard Jimmy run down the stairs, and fall over
+something, almost breaking his wrist. It was the eiderdown comfort,
+half-way up the studio staircase!
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII. HE DOES NOT DENY IT
+
+Aunt Selina got up the next morning and Jim told her all the strange
+things that had been happening. She fixed on Flannigan, of course,
+although she still suspected Betty of her watch and other valuables. The
+incident of the comfort she called nervous indigestion and bad hours.
+
+She spent the entire day going through the storeroom and linen closets,
+and running her fingers over things for dust. Whenever she found any
+she looked at me, drew a long breath, and said, “Poor James!” It was
+maddening. And when she went through his clothes and found some buttons
+off (Jim didn’t keep a man, and Takahiro had stopped at his boots) she
+looked at me quite awfully.
+
+“His mother was a perfect housekeeper,” she said. “James was brought up
+in clothes with the buttons on, put on clean shelves.”
+
+“Didn’t they put them on him?” I asked, almost hysterically. It had been
+a bad morning, after a worse night. Every one had found fault with the
+breakfast, and they straggled down one at a time until I was frantic.
+Then Flannigan had talked to me about the pearls, and Mr. Harbison had
+said, “Good morning,” very stiffly, and nearly rattled the inside of the
+furnace out.
+
+Early in the morning, too, I overheard a scrap of conversation between
+the policeman and our gentleman adventurer from South America. Something
+had gone wrong with the telephone and Mr. Harbison was fussing over it
+with a screw driver and a pair of scissors--all the tools he could find.
+Flannigan was lifting rugs to shake them on the roof--Bella’s order.
+
+“Wash the table linen!” he was grumbling. “I’ll do what I can that’s
+necessary. Grub has to be cooked, and dishes has to be washed--I’ll
+admit that. If you’re particular, make up your bed every day; I don’t
+object. But don’t tell me we have to use thirty-three table napkins
+a day. What did folks do before napkins was invented? Tell me
+that!”--triumphantly.
+
+“What’s the answer?” Mr. Harbison inquired absently, evidently with the
+screw driver in his mouth.
+
+“Used their pocket handkerchiefs! And if the worst comes to the
+worst, Mr. Harbison, these folks here can use their sleeves, for all
+I care--not that the women has any sleeves to speak of. Wash clothes I
+will not.”
+
+“Well, don’t worry Mrs. Wilson about it,” the other voice said.
+Flannigan straightened himself with a grunt.
+
+“Mrs. Wilson!” he said. “A lot she would worry. She’s been a
+disappointment to me, Mr. Harbison, me thinking that now she’d come back
+to him, after leavin’ him the way she did, they’d be like two turtle
+doves. Lord! The cook next door--”
+
+But what the cook had told about Bella and Jimmy was not divulged,
+for the Harbison man caught him up with a jerk and sent Flannigan,
+grumbling, with his rugs to the roof.
+
+It did not seem possible to carry on the deception much longer, but if
+things were bad now, what would they be when Aunt Selina learned she had
+been lied to, made ridiculous, generally deceived? And how would I be
+able to live in the house with her when she did know? Luckily, every
+one was so puzzled over the mystery in the house that numbers of little
+things that would have been absolutely damning were never noticed at
+all. For instance, my asking Jimmy at luncheon that day if he took cream
+in his coffee! And Max coming to the rescue by dropping his watch in
+his glass of water, and creating a diversion and giving everybody an
+opportunity to laugh by saying not to mind, it had been in soak before.
+
+Just after luncheon Aunt Selina brought me some undergarments of Jim’s
+to be patched. She explained at length that he had always worn out his
+undergarments, because he always squirmed around so when he was sitting.
+And she showed me how to lay one of the garments over a pillow to get
+the patch in properly.
+
+It was the most humiliating moment of my life, but there was no escape.
+I took my sewing to the roof, while she went away to find something else
+for me to do when that was finished, and I sat with the thing on my
+knee and stared at it, while rebellious tears rolled down my cheeks.
+The patch was not the shape of the hole at all, and every time I took a
+stitch I sewed it fast to the pillow beneath. It was terrible. Jim came
+up after a while and sat down across from me and watched, without saying
+anything. I suppose what he felt would not have been proper to say to
+me. We had both reached the point where adequate language failed us.
+Finally he said:
+
+“I wish I were dead.”
+
+“So do I,” I retorted, jerking the thread.
+
+“Where is she now?”
+
+“Looking for more of these.” I indicated the garment over the pillow,
+and he wiggled. “Please don’t squirm,” I said coldly. “You will wear out
+your--lingerie, and I will have to mend them.”
+
+He sat very still for five minutes, when I discovered that I had put the
+patch in crosswise instead of lengthwise and that it would not fit. As I
+jerked it out he sneezed.
+
+“Or sneeze,” I added venomously. “You will tear your buttons off, and I
+will have to sew them on.”
+
+Jim rose wrathfully. “Don’t sit, don’t sneeze,” he repeated. “Don’t
+stand, I suppose, for fear I will wear out my socks. Here, give me that.
+If the fool thing has to be mended, I’ll do it myself.”
+
+He went over to a corner of the parapet and turned his back to me. He
+was very much offended. In about a minute he came back, triumphant, and
+held out the result of his labor. I could only gasp. He had puckered up
+the edges of the hole like the neck of a bag, and had tied the thread
+around it. “You--you won’t be able to sit down,” I ventured.
+
+“Don’t have any time to sit,” he retorted promptly. “Anyhow, it will
+give some, won’t it? It would if it was tied with elastic instead of
+thread. Have you any elastic?”
+
+Lollie came up just then, and Jim took himself and his mending
+downstairs. Luckily, Aunt Selina found several letters in his room that
+afternoon while she was going over his clothes, and as it took Jim some
+time to explain them, she forgot the task she had given me altogether.
+
+When Lollie came up to the roof, she closed the door to the stairs, and
+coming over, drew a chair close to mine.
+
+“Have you seen much of Tom today?” she asked, as an introduction.
+
+“I suppose you mean Mr. Harbison, Lollie,” I said. “No--not any more
+than I could help. Don’t whisper, he couldn’t possibly hear you. And if
+it’s scandal I don’t want to know it.”
+
+“Look here, Kit,” she retorted, “you needn’t be so superior. If I like
+to talk scandal, I’m not so sure you aren’t making it.”
+
+That was the way right along: I was making scandal; I brought them there
+to dinner; I let Bella in!
+
+And, of course, Anne came up then, and began on me at once.
+
+“You are a very bad girl,” she began. “What do you mean by treating Tom
+Harbison the way you do? He is heart-broken.”
+
+“I think you exaggerate my influence over him,” I retorted. “I haven’t
+treated him badly, because I haven’t paid any attention to him.”
+
+Anne threw up her hands.
+
+“There you are!” she said. “He worked all day yesterday fixing this
+place for you--yes, for you, my dear. I am not blind--and last night you
+refused to let him bring you up.”
+
+“He told you!” I flamed.
+
+“He wondered what he had done. And as you wouldn’t let him come within
+speaking distance of you, he came to me.”
+
+“I am sorry, Anne, since you are fond of him,” I said. “But to me he is
+impossible--intolerable. My reasons are quite sufficient.”
+
+“Kit is perfectly right, Anne,” Leila broke in. “I tell you, there is
+something queer about him,” she added in a portentous whisper.
+
+Anne stiffened.
+
+“He is perfect,” she declared. “Of good family, warm-hearted,
+courageous, handsome, clever--what more do you ask?”
+
+“Honesty,” said Leila hotly. “That a man should be what he says he is.”
+
+Anne and I both stared.
+
+“It is your Mr. Harbison,” Leila went on, “who tried to escape from the
+house by putting a board across to the next roof!”
+
+“I don’t believe it,” said Anne. “You might bring me a picture of him,
+board in hand, and I wouldn’t believe it.”
+
+“Don’t then,” Lollie said cruelly. “Let him get away with your pearls;
+they are yours. Only, as sure as anything, the man who tried to escape
+from the house had a reason for escaping, and the papers said a man in
+evening dress and light overcoat. I found Mr. Harbison’s overcoat today
+lying in a heap in one of the maids’ rooms, and it was covered with
+brick dust all over the front. A button had even been torn off.”
+
+“Pooh!” Anne said, when she had recovered herself a little. “There isn’t
+any reason, as far as that goes, why Flannigan shouldn’t have worn Tom’s
+overcoat, or--any of the others.”
+
+“Flannigan!” Leila said loftily. “Why, his arms are like piano legs; he
+couldn’t get into it. As for the others, there is only one person who
+would fit, or nearly fit, that overcoat, and that is Dallas, Anne.”
+
+While Anne was choking down her wrath, Leila got up and darted out of
+the tent. When she came back she was triumphant.
+
+“Look,” she said, holding out her hand. And on her palm lay a lightish
+brown button. “I found it just where the paper said the board was thrown
+out, and it is from Mr. Harbison’s overcoat, without a doubt.”
+
+Of course I should not have been surprised. A man who would kiss a woman
+on a dark staircase--a woman he had known only two days--was capable of
+anything.
+
+“Kit has only been a little keener than the rest of us,” Lollie said.
+“She found him out yesterday.”
+
+“Upon my word,” said Anne indignantly, preparing to go, “if I didn’t
+know you girls so well, I would think you were crazy. And now, just to
+offset this, I can tell you something. Flannigan told me this morning
+not to worry; that he has my pearl collar spotted, and that YOUNG LADIES
+WILL HAVE THEIR JOKES!”
+
+Yes, as I said before, it was a cheerful, joy-producing situation.
+
+I sat and thought it over after Anne’s parting shot, when Leila had
+flounced downstairs. Things were closing in; I gave the situation
+twenty-four hours to develop. At the end of that time Flannigan would
+accuse me openly of knowing where the pearls were; I would explain my
+silly remark to him and the mine would explode--under Aunt Selina.
+
+I was sunk in dejected reverie when some one came on the roof. When he
+was opposite the opening in the tent, I saw Mr. Harbison, and at that
+moment he saw me. He paused uncertainly, then he made an evident effort
+and came over to me.
+
+“You are--better today?”
+
+“Quite well, thank you.”
+
+“I am glad you find the tent useful. Does it keep off the wind?”
+
+“It is quite a shelter”--frigidly.
+
+He still stood, struggling for something to say. Evidently nothing came
+to his mind, for he lifted the cap he was wearing, and turning away,
+began to work with the wiring of the roof. He was clever with tools; one
+could see that. If he was a professional gentleman-burglar, no doubt he
+needed to be. After a bit, finding it necessary to climb to the parapet,
+he took off his coat, without even a glance in my direction, and fell to
+work vigorously.
+
+One does not need to like a man to admire him physically, any more than
+one needs to like a race horse or any other splendid animal. No one
+could deny that the man on the parapet was a splendid animal; he looked
+quite big enough and strong enough to have tossed his slender bridge
+across the gulf to the next roof, without any difficulty, and coordinate
+enough to have crossed on it with a flourish to safety.
+
+Just then there was a rending, tearing sound from the corner and a
+muttered ejaculation. I looked up in time to see Mr. Harbison throw up
+his arms, make a futile attempt to regain his balance, and disappear
+over the edge of the roof. One instant he was standing there, splendid,
+superb; the next, the corner of the parapet was empty, all that stood
+there was a broken, splintered post and a tangle of wires.
+
+I could not have moved at first; at least, it seemed hours before the
+full significance of the thing penetrated my dazed brain. When I got up
+I seemed to walk, to crawl, with leaden weights holding back my feet.
+
+When I got to the corner I had to catch the post for support. I knew
+somebody was saying, “Oh, how terrible!” over and over. It was only
+afterward that I knew it had been myself. And then some other voice was
+saying, “Don’t be alarmed. Please don’t be frightened. I’m all right.”
+
+I dared to look over the parapet, finally, and instead of a crushed and
+unspeakable body, there was Mr. Harbison, sitting about eight feet below
+me, with his feet swinging into space and a long red scratch from the
+corner of his eye across his cheek. There was a sort of mansard there,
+with windows, and just enough coping to keep him from rolling off.
+
+“I thought you had fallen--all the way,” I gasped, trying to keep my
+lips from trembling. “I--oh, don’t dangle your feet like that!”
+
+He did not seem at all glad of his escape. He sat there gloomily,
+peering into the gulf beneath.
+
+“If it wasn’t so--er--messy and generally unpleasant,” he replied
+without looking up, “I would slide off and go the rest of the way.”
+
+“You are childish,” I said severely. “See if you can get through the
+window behind you. If you can not, I’ll come down and unfasten it.” But
+the window was open, and I had a chance to sit down and gather up the
+scattered ends of my nerves. To my surprise, however, when he came back
+he made no effort to renew our conversation. He ignored me completely,
+and went to work at once to repair the damage to his wires, with his
+back to me.
+
+“I think you are very rude,” I said at last. “You fell over there and I
+thought you were killed. The nervous shock I experienced is just as bad
+as if you had gone--all the way.”
+
+He put down the hammer and came over to me without speaking. Then, when
+he was quite close, he said:
+
+“I am very sorry if I startled you. I did not flatter myself that you
+would be profoundly affected, in any event.”
+
+“Oh, as to that,” I said lightly, “it makes me ill for days if my car
+runs over a dog.” He looked at me in silence. “You are not going to get
+up on that parapet again?”
+
+“Mrs. Wilson,” he said, without paying the slightest attention to my
+question, “will you tell me what I have done?”
+
+“Done?”
+
+“Or have not done? I have racked my brains--stayed awake all of last
+night. At first I hoped it was impersonal, that, womanlike you were
+merely venting general disfavor on one particular individual. But--your
+hostility is to me, personally.”
+
+I raised my eyebrows, coldly interrogative.
+
+“Perhaps,” he went on calmly--“perhaps I was a fool here on the
+roof--the night before last. If I said anything that I should not, I ask
+your pardon. If it is not that, I think you ought to ask mine!”
+
+I was angry enough then.
+
+“There can be only one opinion about your conduct,” I retorted warmly.
+“It was worse than brutal. It--it was unspeakable. I have no words for
+it--except that I loathe it--and you.”
+
+He was very grim by this time. “I have heard you say something like that
+before--only I was not the unfortunate in that case.”
+
+“Oh!” I was choking.
+
+“Under different circumstances I should be the last person to recall
+anything so--personal. But the circumstances are unusual.” He took an
+angry step toward me. “Will you tell me what I have done? Or shall I go
+down and ask the others?”
+
+“You wouldn’t dare,” I cried, “or I will tell them what you did! How you
+waylaid me on those stairs there, and forced your caresses, your kisses,
+on me! Oh, I could die with shame!”
+
+The silence that followed was as unexpected as it was ominous. I knew
+he was staring at me, and I was furious to find myself so emotional, so
+much more the excited of the two. Finally, I looked up.
+
+“You can not deny it,” I said, a sort of anti-climax.
+
+“No.” He was very quiet, very grim, quite composed. “No,” he repeated
+judicially. “I do not deny it.”
+
+He did not? Or he would not? Which?
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV. ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE
+
+Dal had been acting strangely all day. Once, early in the evening, when
+I had doubled no trump, he led me a club without apology, and later
+on, during his dummy, I saw him writing our names on the back of an
+envelope, and putting numbers after them. At my earliest opportunity I
+went to Max.
+
+“There is something the matter with Dal, Max,” I volunteered. “He
+has been acting strangely all day, and just now he was making out a
+list--names and numbers.”
+
+“You’re to blame for that, Kit,” Max said seriously. “You put washing
+soda instead of baking soda in those biscuits today, and he thinks he is
+a steam laundry. Those are laundry lists he’s making out. He asked me a
+little while ago if I wanted a domestic finish.”
+
+Yes, I had put washing soda in the biscuits. The book said soda, and how
+is one to know which is meant?
+
+“I do not think you are calculated for a domestic finish,” I said coldly
+as I turned away. “In any case I disclaim any such responsibility.
+But--there is SOMETHING on Dal’s mind.”
+
+Max came after me. “Don’t be cross, Kit. You haven’t said a nice word
+to me today, and you go around bristling with your chin up and two red
+spots on your cheeks--like whatever-her-name-was with the snakes instead
+of hair. I don’t know why I’m so crazy about you; I always meant to love
+a girl with a nice disposition.”
+
+I left him then. Dal had gone into the reception room and closed the
+doors. And because he had been acting so strangely, and partly to escape
+from Max, whose eyes looked threatening, I followed him. Just as I
+opened the door quietly and looked in, Dallas switched off the lights,
+and I could hear him groping his way across the room. Then somebody--not
+Dal--spoke from the corner, cautiously.
+
+“Is that you, Mr. Brown, sir?” It was Flannigan.
+
+“Yes. Is everything here?”
+
+“All but the powder, sir. Don’t step too close. They’re spread all over
+the place.”
+
+“Have you taken the curtains down?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Matches?”
+
+“Here, sir.”
+
+“Light one, will you, Flannigan? I want to see the time.”
+
+The flare showed Dallas and Flannigan bent over the timepiece. And it
+showed something else. The rug had been turned back from the windows
+which opened on the street, and the curtains had been removed. On the
+bare hardwood floor just beneath the windows was an array of pans of
+various sizes, dish pans, cake tins, and a metal foot tub. The pans were
+raised from the floor on bricks, and seemed to be full of paper. All the
+chairs and tables were pushed back against the wall, and the bric-a-brac
+was stacked on the mantel.
+
+“Half an hour yet,” Dal said, closing his watch. “Plenty of time, and
+remember the signal, four short and two long.”
+
+“Four short and two long--all right, sir.”
+
+“And--Flannigan, here’s something for you, on account.”
+
+“Thank you, sir.”
+
+Dal turned to go out, tripped over the rug, said something, and passed
+me without an idea of my presence. A moment later Flannigan went out,
+and I was left, huddled against the wall, and alone.
+
+It was puzzling enough. “Four long and two short!” “All but the powder!”
+ Not that I believed for a moment what Max had said, and anyhow Flannigan
+was the sanest person I ever saw in my life. But it all seemed a part
+of the mystery that had been hanging over us for several days. I felt my
+way across the room and knelt by the pans. Yes, they were there, full of
+paper and mounted on bricks. It had not been a delusion.
+
+And then I straightened on my knees suddenly, for an automobile passing
+under the windows had sounded four short honks and two long ones. The
+signal was followed instantly by a crash. The foot bath had fallen from
+its supports, and lay, quivering and vibrating with horrid noises at my
+feet. The next moment Mr. Harbison had thrown open the door and leaped
+into the room.
+
+“Who’s there?” he demanded. Against the light I could see him reaching
+for his hip pocket, and the rest crowding up around him.
+
+“It’s only me,” I quavered, “that is, I. The--the dish pan upset.”
+
+“Dish pan!” Bella said from back in the crowd. “Kit, of course!”
+
+Jim forced his way through then and turned on the lights. I have no
+doubt I looked very strange, kneeling there on the bare floor, with a
+row of pans mounted on bricks behind me, and the furniture all piled on
+itself in a back corner.
+
+“Kit! What in the world--!” Jim began, and stopped. He stared from me to
+the pans, to the windows, to the bric-a-brac on the mantel, and back to
+me.
+
+I sat stonily silent. Why should I explain? Whenever I got into a
+foolish position, and tried to explain, and tell how it happened, and
+who was really to blame, they always brought it back to ME somehow. So I
+sat there on the floor and let them stare. And finally Lollie Mercer got
+her breath and said, “How perfectly lovely; it’s a charade!”
+
+And Anne guessed “kitchen” at once. “Kit, you know, and the pans
+and--all that,” she said vaguely. At that they all took to guessing! And
+I sat still, until Mr. Harbison saw the storm in my eyes and came over
+to me.
+
+“Have you hurt your ankle?” he said in an undertone. “Let me help you
+up.”
+
+“I am not hurt,” I said coldly, “and even if I were, it would be
+unnecessary to trouble you.”
+
+“I can not help being troubled,” he returned, just as evenly. “‘You see,
+it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.’”
+
+Luckily, at that moment Dal came in. He pushed his way through the
+crowd without a word, shut off the lights, crashed through the pans and
+slammed the shutters closed. Then he turned and addressed the rest.
+
+“Of all the lunatics--!” he began, only there was more to it than that.
+“A fellow goes to all kinds of trouble to put an end to this miserable
+situation, and the entire household turns out and sets to work to
+frustrate the whole scheme. You LIKE to stay here, don’t you, like
+chickens in a coop? Where’s Flannigan?”
+
+Nobody understood Dal’s wrath then, but it seems he meant to arrange
+the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour nearly come, he
+intended to wager that he could break the quarantine, and to take any
+odds he could get that he would free the entire party in half an hour.
+As for the plan itself, it was idiotically simple; we were perfectly
+delighted when we heard it. It was so simple and yet so comprehensive.
+We didn’t see how it COULD fail. Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the
+strength of it, and Anne was furious. Jim was not so much pleased, for
+some reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than
+merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.
+
+The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the
+windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is
+used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and
+yelled “fire” and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the
+front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement
+kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as
+quickly as we could.
+
+You can see how simple it was.
+
+We were terribly excited, of course. Every one rushed madly for motor
+coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people going the
+same direction would have the same machine. We called to each other as
+we dressed about Mamaroneck or Lakewood or wherever we happened to have
+relatives. Everybody knew everybody else, and his friends. The Mercer
+girls were going to cruise until the trouble blew over, the Browns were
+going to Pinehurst, and Jim was going to Africa to hunt, if he could get
+out of the harbor.
+
+Only the Harbison man seemed to have no plans; quite suddenly with the
+world so near again, the world of country houses and steam yachts and
+all the rest of it, he ceased to be one of us. It was not his world at
+all. He stood back and watched the kaleidoscope of our coats and veils,
+half-quizzically, but with something in his face that I had not seen
+there before. If he had not been so self-reliant and big, I would have
+said he was lonely. Not that he was pathetic in any sense of the word.
+Of course, he avoided me, which was natural and exactly what I wished.
+Bella never was far from him and at the last she loaded him with her
+jewel case and a muff and traveling bag and asked him to her cousins’ on
+Long Island. I felt sure he was going to decline, when he glanced across
+at me.
+
+“Do go,” I said, very politely. “They are charming people.” And he
+accepted at once!
+
+It was a transparent plot on Bella’s part: Two elderly maiden ladies,
+house miles from anywhere, long evenings in the music room with an open
+fire and Bella at the harp playing the two songs she knows.
+
+When we were ready and gathered in the kitchen, in the darkness, of
+course, Dal went up on the roof and signaled with a lantern to the cars
+on the drive. Then he went downstairs, took a last look at the drawing
+room, fired the papers, shook on the powder, opened the windows and
+yelled “fire!”
+
+Of course, huddled in the kitchen we had heard little or nothing. But we
+plainly heard Dal on the first floor and Flannigan on the second yelling
+“fire,” and the patter of feet as the guards ran to the front of the
+house. And at that instant we remembered Aunt Selina!
+
+That was the cause of the whole trouble. I don’t know why they turned on
+me; she wasn’t my aunt. But by the time we had got her out of bed, and
+had wrapped her in an eiderdown comfort, and stuck slippers on her feet
+and a motor veil on her head, the glare at the front of the house was
+beginning to die away. She didn’t understand at all and we had no time
+to explain. I remember that she wanted to go back and get her “plate,”
+ whatever that may be, but Jim took her by the arm and hurried her along,
+and the rest, who had waited, and were in awful tempers, stood aside and
+let them out first.
+
+The door to the area steps was open, and by the street lights we could
+see a fence and a gate, which opened on a side street. Jim and Aunt
+Selina ran straight for the gate; the wind blowing Aunt Selina’s comfort
+like a sail. Then, with our feet, so to speak, on the first rungs of the
+ladder of Liberty, it slipped. A half-dozen guards and reporters came
+around the house and drove us back like sheep into a slaughter pen. It
+was the most humiliating moment of my life.
+
+Dal had been for fighting a way through, and just for a minute I think
+I went Berserk myself. But Max spied one of the reporters setting up a
+flash light as we stood, undecided, at the top of the steps, and after
+that there was nothing to do but retreat. We backed down slowly, to show
+them we were not afraid. And when we were all in the kitchen again, and
+had turned on the lights and Bella was crying with her head against Mr.
+Harbison’s arm, Dal said cheerfully,
+
+“Well, it has done some good, anyhow. We have lost Aunt Selina.”
+
+And we all shook hands on it, although we were sorry about Jim. And Dal
+said we would have some champagne and drink to Aunt Selina’s comfort,
+and we could have her teeth fumigated and send them to her. Somebody
+said “Poor old Jim,” and at that Bella looked up.
+
+She stared around the group, and then she went quite pale.
+
+“Jim!” she gasped. “Do you mean--that Jim is--out there too?”
+
+“Jim and Aunt Selina!” I said as calmly as I could for joy. You can see
+how it simplified the situation for me. “By this time they are a mile
+away, and going!”
+
+Everybody shook hands again except Bella. She had dropped into a chair,
+and sat biting her lip and breathing hard, and she would not join in any
+of the hilarity at getting rid of Aunt Selina. Finally she got up and
+knocked over her chair.
+
+“You are a lot of cowards,” she stormed. “You deserted them out there,
+left them. Heaven knows where they are--a defenseless old woman,
+and--and a man who did not even have an overcoat. And it is snowing!”
+
+“Never mind,” Dal said reassuringly. “He can borrow Aunt Selina’s
+comfort. Make the old lady discard from weakness. Anyhow, Bella, if I
+know anything of human nature, the old lady will make it hot enough for
+him. Poor old Jim!”
+
+Then they shook hands again, and with that there came a terrible banging
+at the door, which we had locked.
+
+“Open the door!” some one commanded. It was one of the guards.
+
+“Open it yourself!” Dallas called, moving a kitchen table to reenforce
+the lock.
+
+“Open that door or we will break it in!”
+
+Dallas put his hands in his pockets, seated himself on the table, and
+whistled cheerfully. We could hear them conferring outside, and they
+made another appeal which was refused. Suddenly Bella came over and
+confronted Dallas.
+
+“They have brought them back!” she said dramatically. “They are out
+there now; I distinctly heard Jim’s voice. Open that door, Dallas!”
+
+“Oh, DON’T let them in!” I wailed. It was quite involuntary, but the
+disappointment was too awful. “Dallas, DON’T open that door!”
+
+Dal swung his feet and smiled from Bella to me.
+
+“Think what a solution it is to all our difficulties,” he said easily.
+“Without Aunt Selina I could be happy here indefinitely.”
+
+There was more knocking, and somebody--Max, I think--said to let them
+in, that it was a fool thing anyhow, and that he wanted to go to bed and
+forget it; his feet were cold. And just then there was a crash, and part
+of one of the windows fell in. The next blow from outside brought the
+rest of the glass, and--somebody was coming through, feet first. It was
+Jim.
+
+He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped in a bundle of red
+and yellow silk comfort that proved to be Aunt Selina, also feet first.
+I had a glimpse of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters.
+Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt Selina’s legs so
+that she could walk, offered his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs,
+without a word!
+
+None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and went upstairs and took
+off our wraps and went to bed. It had been almost a fiasco.
+
+
+
+Chapter XV. SUSPICION AND DISCORD
+
+Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her
+feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all
+morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he
+watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out
+of the house.
+
+When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going
+to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen
+to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited
+together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was
+somewhat ruffled.
+
+“He wouldn’t open the door,” he reported, “and when I told him it was
+meal time, he said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t give a whoop about
+the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn’t proposed to
+adopt us.”
+
+So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o’clock Jim came
+downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella
+had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never
+seen to speak to him unnecessarily.
+
+The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms
+of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne’s pearls, using them,
+the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace
+or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and
+stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner
+on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with
+a copy of Poe’s Purloined Letter and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq. He went
+through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and
+lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next
+day, the fourth, he found something--not much, but it was curious. He
+had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with
+Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing
+around watching him.
+
+Max was strutting.
+
+“We get it by elimination,” he said importantly. “The pearls being
+nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts
+of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies
+and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this
+canvas with my wand--there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare
+to move the canvas--so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this
+disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!”
+
+Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his
+hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond
+clasp from Anne’s collar!
+
+Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.
+
+“Well, I’ll be flabbergasted!” he said. “I say, you people, you don’t
+think for a minute that I put that thing there? Why, I haven’t worn that
+coat for a month. It’s--it’s a trick of yours, Max.”
+
+But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the
+clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat. Betty dropped on a folding
+stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion,
+while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.
+
+“We will find it all now,” she said excitedly. “Did you look in the
+other pockets, Max?”
+
+Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among
+the men. Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having
+rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene
+with non-committal eyes. It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried
+inventory of the other pockets.
+
+“Nothing else,” he said constrainedly. “I’ll move the rest of the
+canvases.”
+
+But Jim interfered, to every one’s surprise.
+
+“I wouldn’t, if I were you, Max. There’s nothing back there. I had ‘em
+out yesterday.” He was quite pale.
+
+“Nonsense!” Max said gruffly. “If it’s a practical joke, Jim, why don’t
+you fess up? Anne has worried enough.”
+
+“The pearls are not there, I tell you,” Jim began. Although the studio
+was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face. “I must
+ask you not to move those pictures.” And then Aunt Selina came to the
+rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of
+canvases.
+
+“As far as I can understand this,” she declaimed, “you gentlemen are
+trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman’s
+jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket. Certainly you will
+not move the pictures. How do you know that the young gentleman who said
+he found it there didn’t have it up his sleeve?”
+
+She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered. Dallas soothed her,
+however.
+
+“Exactly so,” he said. “How do we know that Max didn’t have the clasp
+up his sleeve? My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the
+pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace. I suggest tea on
+the roof; those in favor--? My arm, Miss Caruthers.”
+
+It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn’t dare to have
+the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus
+girl photographs and life-class crayons that were not for Aunt Selina’s
+eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of
+whisky. Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion
+and discord in the house.
+
+Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery. Anne drank
+her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude
+that boded ill to somebody. The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt
+Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her
+back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of
+Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her). Betty and
+Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like
+a pair of children. It was quite certain that neither his escape from
+death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.
+
+While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open
+safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of
+his nose--I forget which--Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the
+privacy of the roof for his training hour.
+
+Yes, he was training. Flannigan claimed to know the system that had
+reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every
+day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening. He claimed
+to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and
+Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before
+with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.
+
+The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery. They sandpapered the
+inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had
+finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the
+tent. Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about
+it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had
+anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid
+of it.
+
+At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the
+afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan
+following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath
+towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they
+all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead
+of me. At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.
+
+“That policeman looks cruel,” she said. “What’s more, he’s been in a
+bad humor all day. More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof
+and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are
+inhuman.”
+
+“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.
+
+“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina
+insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back. “I don’t think it’s
+safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I
+would watch him. You will have to stay,” she said, fixing me with her
+imperious eyes.
+
+So I stayed. Jim didn’t want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But
+it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I
+wanted to see the barrel in use.
+
+I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First,
+Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred
+up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.
+
+Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen,
+became an autocrat on the roof.
+
+“Once more,” he would say. “Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!”
+
+And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his
+poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around
+his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems
+there isn’t much to a running suit.
+
+“Head up,” Flannigan would say. “Lift your knees, sir. Didn’t you ever
+see a horse with string halt?”
+
+He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then
+he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the
+couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say
+a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up
+gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.
+
+“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly.
+“You’ll drop it in chunks.”
+
+Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his
+feet.
+
+“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck. “If we’re in here thirty
+days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t forget to stop in
+time, Flannigan. I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”
+
+He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.
+
+“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me. “Your uncle is going
+to look as angular as a problem in geometry. I’ll--I’ll be the original
+reductio ad absurdum. Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan?
+Wouldn’t that reduce something?”
+
+“Your brains, sir,” Flannigan retorted gravely, and presented a pair of
+boxing gloves. Jim visibly quailed, but he put them on.
+
+“Do you know, Flannigan,” he remarked, as he fastened them, “I’m
+thinking of wearing these all the time. They hide my character.”
+
+Flannigan looked puzzled, but he did not ask an explanation. He demanded
+that Jim shed the bath robe, which he finally did, on my promise to
+watch the sunset. Then for fully a minute there was no sound save of
+feet running rapidly around the roof, and an occasional soft thud. Each
+thud was accompanied by a grunt or two from Jim. Flannigan was grimly
+silent. Once there was a smart rap, an oath from the policeman, and a
+mirthless chuckle from Jim. The chuckle ended in a crash, however, and I
+turned. Jim was lying on his back on the roof, and Flannigan was wiping
+his ear with a towel. Jim sat up and ran his hand down his ribs.
+
+“They’re all here,” he observed after a minute. “I thought I missed
+one.”
+
+“The only way to take a man’s weight down,” Flannigan said dryly.
+
+Jim got up dizzily.
+
+“Down on the roof, I suppose you mean,” he said.
+
+The next proceedings were mysterious. Flannigan rolled the barrel into
+the tent, and carried in a small glass lamp. With the material at hand
+he seemed to be effecting a combination, no new one, to judge by his
+facility. Then he called Jim.
+
+At the door of the tent Jim turned to me, his bathrobe toga fashion
+around his shoulders.
+
+“This is a very essential part of the treatment,” he said solemnly. “The
+exercise, according to Flannigan, loosens up the adipose tissue. The
+next step is to boil it out. I hope, unless your instructions compel
+you, that you will at least have the decency to stay out of the tent.”
+
+“I am going at once,” I said, outraged. “I’m not here because I’m mad
+about it, and you know it. And don’t pose with that bath robe. If you
+think you’re a character out of Roman history, look at your legs.”
+
+“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said sulkily. “Only I’m tired of
+having you choked down my throat every time I open my mouth, Kit. And
+don’t go just yet. Flannigan is going for my clothes as soon as he
+lights the--the lamp, and--somebody ought to watch the stairs.”
+
+That was all there was to it. I said I would guard the steps, and
+Flannigan, having ignited the combination, whatever it was, went
+downstairs. How was I to know that Bella would come up when she did? Was
+it my fault that the lamp got too high, and that Flannigan couldn’t
+hear Jim calling? Or that just as Bella reached the top of the steps
+Jim should come to the door of the tent, wearing the barrel part of his
+hot-air cabinet, and yelling for a doctor?
+
+Bella came to a dead stop on the upper step, with her mouth open. She
+looked at Jim, at the inadequate barrel, and from them she looked at me.
+Then she began to laugh, one of her hysterical giggles, and she turned
+and went down again. As Jim and I stared at each other we could hear her
+gurgling down the hall below.
+
+She had violent hysterics for an hour, with Anne rubbing her forehead
+and Aunt Selina burning a feather out of the feather duster under her
+nose. Only Jim and I understood, and we did not tell. Luckily, the next
+thing that occurred drove Bella and her nerves from everybody’s mind.
+
+At seven o’clock, when Bella had dropped asleep and everybody else was
+dressed for dinner, Aunt Selina discovered that the house was cold, and
+ordered Dal to the furnace.
+
+It was Dal’s day at the furnace; Flannigan had been relieved of that
+part of the work after twice setting fire to a chimney.
+
+In five minutes Dal came back and spoke a few words to Max, who followed
+him to the basement, and in ten minutes more Flannigan puffed up the
+steps and called Mr. Harbison.
+
+I am not curious, but I knew that something had happened. While Aunt
+Selina was talking suffrage to Anne--who said she had always been
+tremendously interested in the subject, and if women got the suffrage
+would they be allowed to vote?--I slipped back to the dining room.
+
+The table was laid for dinner, but Flannigan was not in sight. I could
+hear voices from somewhere, faint voices that talked rapidly, and after
+a while I located the sounds under my feet. The men were all in the
+basement, and something must have happened. I flew back to the basement
+stairs, to meet Mr. Harbison at the foot. He was grimy and dusty,
+with streaks of coal dust over his face, and he had been examining his
+revolver. I was just in time to see him slip it into his pocket.
+
+“What is the matter?” I demanded. “Is any one hurt?”
+
+“No one,” he said coolly. “We’ve been cleaning out the furnace.”
+
+“With a revolver! How interesting--and unusual!” I said dryly, and
+slipped past him as he barred the way. He was not pleased; I heard him
+mutter something and come rapidly after me, but I had the voices as a
+guide, and I was not going to be turned back like a child. The men had
+gathered around a low stone arch in the furnace room, and were looking
+down a short flight of steps, into a sort of vault, evidently under the
+pavement. A faint light came from a small grating above, and there was a
+close, musty smell in the air.
+
+“I tell you it must have been last night,” Dallas was saying. “Wilson
+and I were here before we went to bed, and I’ll swear that hole was not
+there then.”
+
+“It was not there this morning, sir,” Flannigan insisted. “It has been
+made during the day.”
+
+“And it could not have been done this afternoon,” Mr. Harbison said
+quietly. “I was fussing with the telephone wire down here. I would have
+heard the noise.”
+
+Something in his voice made me look at him, and certainly his expression
+was unusual. He was watching us all intently while Dallas pointed out to
+me the cause of the excitement. From the main floor of the furnace room,
+a flight of stone steps surmounted by an arch led into the coal cellar,
+beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor,
+and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three,
+leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black--evidently a similar
+vault belonging to the next house.
+
+The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with
+possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim’s candle and
+crawled through the aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening to
+his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light
+that came through the ragged opening in the wall. Then he came back and
+called through to us.
+
+“Place is locked, over here,” he said. “Heavy oak door at the head of
+the steps. Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of
+labor for nothing.”
+
+The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the bricks, and he
+picked it up and balanced it on his hand. Dallas’ florid face was almost
+comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy--he slammed a piece of slag at
+the furnace and walked away. At the door he turned around.
+
+“Why don’t you accuse me of it?” he asked bitterly. “Maybe you could
+find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”
+
+He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up
+together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say. Not
+until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look
+at something that I carried in the palm of my hand. It was a watch, not
+running--a gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its
+fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.
+
+In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a
+girl, cut from a newspaper.
+
+It was my picture.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI. I FACE FLANNIGAN
+
+Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and
+stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of
+it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the other side.
+
+I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in the fold
+of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring through the February
+gloom at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious of the
+reporter with a drawing pad just below him in the area-way. I went over
+and closed the shutters before his very eyes, but even then he did not
+move.
+
+“Will you be good enough to turn around?” I demanded at last.
+
+“Oh!” he said wheeling. “Are YOU here?”
+
+There wasn’t any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it on the
+library table between us. The effect was all that I had hoped. He stared
+at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand outstretched for it,
+stopped.
+
+“Where did you find it?” he asked. I couldn’t understand his expression.
+He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.
+
+“I think you know, Mr. Harbison,” I retorted.
+
+“I wish I did. You opened it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+We stood looking at each other across the table. It was his glance that
+wavered.
+
+“About the picture--of you,” he said at last. “You see, down there in
+South America, a fellow hasn’t much to do in the evenings, and a--a chum
+of mine and I--we were awfully down on what we called the plutocrats,
+the--the leisure classes. And when that picture of yours came in the
+paper, we had--we had an argument. He said--” He stopped.
+
+“What did he say?”
+
+“Well, he said it was the picture of an empty-faced society girl.”
+
+“Oh!” I exclaimed.
+
+“I--I maintained there were possibilities in the face.” He put both
+hands on the table, and, bending forward, looked down at me. “Well, I
+was a fool, I admit. I said your eyes were kind and candid, in spite of
+that haughty mouth. You see, I said I was a fool.”
+
+“I think you are exceedingly rude,” I managed finally. “If you want to
+know where I found your watch, it was down in the coal cellar. And
+if you admit you are an idiot, I am not. I--I know all about Bella’s
+bracelet--and the board on the roof, and--oh, if you would only
+leave--Anne’s necklace--on the coal, or somewhere--and get away--”
+
+My voice got beyond me then, and I dropped into a chair and covered my
+face. I could feel him staring at the back of my head.
+
+“Well, I’ll be--” something or other, he said finally, and then he
+turned on his heel and went out. By the time I got my eyes dry (yes, I
+was crying; I always do when I am angry) I heard Jim coming downstairs,
+and I tucked the watch out of sight. Would anyone have foreseen the
+trouble that watch would make!
+
+Jim was sulky. He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs,
+looking gloomily at nothing. Then he got up and ambled into his den,
+closing the door behind him without having spoken a word. It was more
+than human nature could stand.
+
+When I went into the den he was stretched on the davenport with his face
+buried in the cushions. He looked absolutely wilted, and every line of
+him was drooping.
+
+“Go on out, Kit,” he said, in a smothered voice. “Be a good girl and
+don’t follow me around.”
+
+“You are shameless!” I gasped. “Follow you! When you are hung around
+my neck like a--like a--” Millstone was what I wanted to say, but I
+couldn’t think of it.
+
+He turned over and looked up from his cushions like an ill-treated and
+suffering cherub.
+
+“I’m done for, Kit,” he groaned. “Bella went up to the studio after we
+left, and investigated that corner.”
+
+“What did she find? The necklace?” I asked eagerly. He was too wretched
+to notice this.
+
+“No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy--she says
+she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro’s room and take smallpox and
+die.”
+
+“Fiddlesticks!” I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and
+opened it.
+
+“Pardon me for disturbing you,” Bella said, in her best
+dear-me-I’m-glad-I-knocked manner. “But--Flannigan says the dinner has
+not come.”
+
+“Good Lord!” Jim exclaimed. “I forgot to order the confounded dinner!”
+
+It was eight o’clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least
+after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The
+entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted
+Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes
+every minute. And then--he couldn’t raise Central. It was fifteen
+minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another
+despairingly.
+
+“Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to
+do something useful for once,” Max suggested. But he was indignantly
+hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the
+transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch
+that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of
+breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that
+didn’t seem to lend itself to anything.
+
+We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around
+the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk
+about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little
+town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe
+while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina
+related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in
+cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.
+
+“To change this gridiron martyrdom,” Dallas said finally, “where’s
+Harbison? Still looking for his watch?”
+
+“Watch!” Everybody said it in a different tone.
+
+“Sure,” he responded. “Says his watch was taken last night from the
+studio. Better get him down to take a squint at the telephone. Likely he
+can fix it.”
+
+Flannigan was beside me with the cheese. And at that moment I felt Mr.
+Harbison’s stolen watch slip out of my girdle, slide greasily across
+my lap, and clatter to the floor. Flannigan stooped, but luckily it had
+gone under the table. To have had it picked up, to have had to explain
+how I got it, to see them try to ignore my picture pasted in it--oh, it
+was impossible! I put my foot over it.
+
+“Drop something?” Dallas asked perfunctorily, rising. Flannigan was
+still half kneeling.
+
+“A fork,” I said, as easily as I could, and the conversation went on.
+But Flannigan knew, and I knew he knew. He watched my every movement
+like a hawk after that, standing just behind my chair. I dropped my
+useless napkin, to have it whirled up before it reached the floor. I
+said to Betty that my shoe buckle was loose, and actually got the watch
+in my hand, only to let it slip at the critical moment. Then they all
+got up and went sadly back to the library, and Flannigan and I faced
+each other.
+
+Flannigan was not a handsome man at any time, though up to then he had
+at least looked amiable. But now as I stood with my hand on the back of
+my chair, his face grew suddenly menacing. The silence was absolute.
+I was the guiltiest wretch alive, and opposite me the law towered and
+glowered, and held the yellow remnant of a pineapple cheese! And in the
+silence that wretched watch lay and ticked and ticked and ticked. Then
+Flannigan creaked over and closed the door into the hall, came back,
+picked up the watch, and looked at it.
+
+“You’re unlucky, I’m thinkin’,” he said finally. “You’ve got the nerve
+all right, but you ain’t cute enough.”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean,” I quavered. “Give me that watch to return
+to Mr. Harbison.”
+
+“Not on your life,” he retorted easily. “I give it back myself, like
+I did the bracelet, and--like I’m going to give back the necklace, if
+you’ll act like a sensible little girl.”
+
+I could only choke.
+
+“It’s foolish, any way you look at it,” he persisted. “Here you are,
+lots of friends, folks that think you’re all right. Why, I reckon there
+isn’t one of them that wouldn’t lend you money if you needed it so bad.”
+
+“Will you be still?” I said furiously. “Mr. Harbison left that
+watch--with me--an hour ago. Get him, and he will tell you so himself!”
+
+“Of course he would,” Flannigan conceded, looking at me with grudging
+approval. “He wouldn’t be what I think he is, if he didn’t lie up and
+down for you.” There were voices in the hall. Flannigan came closer.
+“An hour ago, you say. And he told me it was gone this morning! It’s
+a losing game, miss. I’ll give you twenty-four hours and then--the
+necklace, if you please, miss.”
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII. A CLASH AND A KISS
+
+The clash that came that evening had been threatening for some time.
+Take an immovable body, represented by Mr. Harbison and his square jaw,
+and an irresistible force, Jimmy and his weight, and there is bound to
+be trouble.
+
+The real fault was Jim’s. He had gone entirely mad again over Bella, and
+thrown prudence to the winds. He mooned at her across the dinner table,
+and waylaid her on the stairs or in the back halls, just to hear her
+voice when she ordered him out of her way. He telephoned for flowers and
+candy for her quite shamelessly, and he got out a book of photographs
+that they had taken on their wedding journey, and kept it on the library
+table. The sole concession he made to our presumptive relationship was
+to bring me the responsibility for everything that went wrong, and his
+shirts for buttons.
+
+The first I heard of the trouble was from Dal. He waylaid me in the hall
+after dinner that night, and his face was serious.
+
+“I’m afraid we can’t keep it up very long, Kit,” he said. “With Jim
+trailing Bella all over the house, and the old lady keener every day,
+it’s bound to come out somehow. And that isn’t all. Jim and Harbison had
+a set-to today--about you.”
+
+“About me!” I repeated. “Oh, I dare say I have been falling short again.
+What was Jim doing? Abusing me?”
+
+Dal looked cautiously over his shoulder, but no one was near.
+
+“It seems that the gentle Bella has been unusually beastly today to Jim,
+and--I believe she’s jealous of you, Kit. Jim followed her up to the
+roof before dinner with a box of flowers, and she tossed them over the
+parapet. She said, I believe, that she didn’t want his flowers; he could
+buy them for you, and be damned to him, or some lady-like equivalent.”
+
+“Jim is a jellyfish,” I said contemptuously. “What did he say?”
+
+“He said he only cared for one woman, and that was Bella; that he never
+had really cared for you and never would, and that divorce courts were
+not unmitigated evils if they showed people the way to real happiness.
+Which wouldn’t amount to anything if Harbison had not been in the tent,
+trying to sleep!”
+
+Dal did not know all the particulars, but it seems that relations
+between Jim and Mr. Harbison were rather strained. Bella had left the
+roof and Jim and the Harbison man came face to face in the door of the
+tent. According to Dal, little had been said, but Jim, bound by his
+promise to me, could not explain, and could only stammer something about
+being an old friend of Miss Knowles. And Tom had replied shortly that
+it was none of his business, but that there were some things friendship
+hardly justified, and tried to pass Jim. Jim was instantly enraged; he
+blocked the door to the roof and demanded to know what the other man
+meant. There were two or three versions of the answer he got. The
+general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further,
+and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted--when a man
+systematically ignored and neglected his wife for some one else, there
+were communities where he would be tarred and feathered.
+
+“Meaning me?” Jim demanded, apoplectic.
+
+“The remark was a general one,” Mr. Harbison retorted, “but if you wish
+to make a concrete application--!”
+
+Dal had gone up just then, and found them glaring at each other, Jim
+with his hands clenched at his sides, and Mr. Harbison with his arms
+folded and very erect. Dal took Jim by the elbow and led him downstairs,
+muttering, and the situation was saved for the time. But Dal was not
+optimistic.
+
+“You can do a bit yourself, Kit,” he finished. “Look more cheerful,
+flirt a little. You can do that without trying. Take Max on for a day or
+so; it would be charity anyhow. But don’t let Tom Harbison take into his
+head that you are grieving over Jim’s neglect, or he’s likely to toss
+him off the roof.”
+
+“I have no reason to think that Mr. Harbison cares one way or the other
+about me,” I said primly. “You don’t think he’s--he’s in love with me,
+do you, Dal?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but he only
+looked amused.
+
+“In love with you!” he repeated. “Why bless your wicked little heart,
+no! He thinks you’re a married woman! It’s the principle of the thing
+he’s fighting for. If I had as much principle as he has, I’d--I’d put it
+out at interest.”
+
+Max interrupted us just then, and asked if we knew where Mr. Harbison
+was.
+
+“Can’t find him,” he said. “I’ve got the telephone together and have
+enough left over to make another. Where do you suppose Harbison hides
+the tools? I’m working with a corkscrew and two palette knives.”
+
+I heard nothing more of the trouble that night. Max went to Jim about
+it, and Jim said angrily that only a fool would interfere between a man
+and his wife--wives. Whereupon Max retorted that a fool and his wives
+were soon parted, and left him. The two principals were coldly civil
+to each other, and smaller issues were lost as the famine grew more and
+more insistent. For famine it was.
+
+They worked the rest of the evening, but the telephone refused to revive
+and every one was starving. Individually our pride was at low ebb, but
+collectively it was still formidable. So we sat around and Jim played
+Grieg with the soft stops on, and Aunt Selina went to bed. The weather
+had changed, and it was sleeting, but anything was better than the
+drawing room. I was in a mood to battle with the elements or to cry--or
+both--so I slipped out, while Dal was reciting “Give me three grains
+of corn, mother,” threw somebody’s overcoat over my shoulders, put on a
+man’s soft hat--Jim’s I think--and went up to the roof.
+
+It was dark in the third floor hall, and I had to feel my way to the
+foot of the stairs. I went up quietly, and turned the knob of the door
+to the roof. At first it would not open, and I could hear the wind
+howling outside. Finally, however, I got the door open a little and
+wormed my way through. It was not entirely dark out there, in spite of
+the storm. A faint reflection of the street lights made it possible to
+distinguish the outlines of the boxwood plants, swaying in the wind, and
+the chimneys and the tent. And then--a dark figure disentangled itself
+from the nearest chimney and seemed to hurl itself at me. I remember
+putting out my hands and trying to say something, but the figure caught
+me roughly by the shoulders and knocked me back against the door frame.
+From miles away a heavy voice was saying, “So I’ve got you!” and then
+the roof gave from under me, and I was floating out on the storm, and
+sleet was beating in my face, and the wind was whispering over and over,
+“Open your eyes, for God’s sake!”
+
+I did open them after a while, and finally I made out that I was laying
+on the floor in the tent. The lights were on, and I had a cold and damp
+feeling, and something wet was trickling down my neck.
+
+I seemed to be alone, but in a second somebody came into the tent, and I
+saw it was Mr. Harbison, and that he had a double handful of half-melted
+snow. He looked frantic and determined, and only my sitting up quickly
+prevented my getting another snow bath. My neck felt queer and stiff,
+and I was very dizzy. When he saw that I was conscious he dropped the
+snow and stood looking down at me.
+
+“Do you know,” he said grimly, “that I very nearly choked you to death a
+little while ago?”
+
+“It wouldn’t surprise me to be told so,” I said. “Do I know too much, or
+what is it, Mr. Harbison?” I felt terribly ill, but I would not let him
+see it. “It is queer, isn’t it--how we always select the roof for our
+little--differences?” He seemed to relax somewhat at my gibe.
+
+“I didn’t know it was you,” he explained shortly. “I was waiting
+for--some one, and in the hat you wore and the coat, I mistook you.
+That’s all. Can you stand?”
+
+“No,” I retorted. I could, but his summary manner displeased me. The
+sequel, however, was rather amazing, for he stooped suddenly and picked
+me up, and the next instant we were out in the storm together. At the
+door he stooped and felt for the knob.
+
+“Turn it,” he commanded. “I can’t reach it.”
+
+“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” I said shrewishly. “Let me down; I can
+walk perfectly well.”
+
+He hesitated. Then he slid me slowly to my feet, but he did not open
+the door at once. “Are you afraid to let me carry you down those stairs,
+after--Tuesday night?” he asked, very low. “You still think I did that?”
+
+I had never been less sure of it than at that moment, but an imp of
+perversity made me retort, “Yes.”
+
+He hardly seemed to hear me. He stood looking down at me as I leaned
+against the door frame.
+
+“Good Lord!” he groaned. “To think that I might have killed you!” And
+then--he stooped and suddenly kissed me.
+
+The next moment the door was open, and he was leading me down into the
+house. At the foot of the staircase he paused, still holding my hand,
+and faced me in the darkness.
+
+“I’m not sorry,” he said steadily. “I suppose I ought to be, but I’m
+not. Only--I want you to know that I was not guilty--before. I didn’t
+intend to now. I am--almost as much surprised as you are.”
+
+I was quite unable to speak, but I wrenched my hand loose. He stepped
+back to let me pass, and I went down the hall alone.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII. IT’S ALL MY FAULT
+
+I didn’t go to the drawing room again. I went into my own room and sat
+in the dark, and tried to be furiously angry, and only succeeded in
+feeling queer and tingly. One thing was absolutely certain: not the same
+man, but two different men had kissed me on the stairs to the roof.
+It sounds rather horrid and discriminating, but there was all the
+difference in the world.
+
+But then--who had? And for whom had Mr. Harbison been waiting on the
+roof? “Did you know that I nearly choked you to death a few minutes
+ago?” Then he rather expected to finish somebody in that way! Who? Jim,
+probably. It was strange, too, but suddenly I realized that no matter
+how many suspicious things I mustered up against him--and there were
+plenty--down in my heart I didn’t believe him guilty of anything, except
+this last and unforgivable offense. Whoever was trying to leave the
+house had taken the necklace, that seemed clear, unless Max was still
+foolishly trying to break quarantine and create one of the sensations he
+so dearly loves. This was a new idea, and some things upheld it, but Max
+had been playing bridge when I was kissed on the stairs, and there was
+still left that ridiculous incident of the comfort.
+
+Bella came up after I had gone to bed, and turned on the light to brush
+her hair.
+
+“If I don’t leave this mausoleum soon, I’ll be carried out,” she
+declared. “You in bed, Lollie Mercer and Dal flirting, Anne hysterical,
+and Jim making his will in the den! You will have to take Aunt Selina
+tonight, Kit; I’m all in.”
+
+“If you’ll put her to bed, I’ll keep her there,” I conceded, after some
+parley.
+
+“You’re a dear.” Bella came back from the door. “Look here, Kit, you
+know Jim pretty well. Don’t you think he looks ill? Thinner?”
+
+“He’s a wreck,” I said soberly. “You have a lot to answer for, Bella.”
+
+Bella went over to the cheval glass and looked in it. “I avoid him all
+I can,” she said, posing. “He’s awfully funny; he’s so afraid I’ll think
+he’s serious about you. He can’t realize that for me he simply doesn’t
+exist.”
+
+Well, I took Aunt Selina, and about two o’clock, while I was in my first
+sleep, I woke to find her standing beside me, tugging at my arm.
+
+“There’s somebody in the house,” she whispered. “Thieves!”
+
+“If they’re in they’ll not get out tonight,” I said.
+
+“I tell you, I saw a man skulking on the stairs,” she insisted.
+
+I got up ungraciously enough, and put on my dressing gown. Aunt Selina,
+who had her hair in crimps, tied a veil over her head, and together we
+went to the head of the stairs. Aunt Selina leaned far over and peered
+down.
+
+“He’s in the library,” she whispered. “I can see a light.”
+
+The lust of battle was in Aunt Selina’s eye. She girded her robe about
+her and began to descend the stairs cautiously. We went through the hall
+and stopped at the library door. It was empty, but from the den beyond
+came a hum of voices and the cheerful glow of fire light. I realized the
+situation then, but it was too late.
+
+“Then why did you kiss her in the dining room?” Bella was saying in her
+clear, high tones. “You did, didn’t you?”
+
+“It was only her hand,” Jim, desperately explaining. “I’ve got to pay
+her some attention, under the circumstances. And I give you my word, I
+was thinking of you when I did it.” THE WRETCH!
+
+Aunt Selina drew her breath in suddenly.
+
+“I am thinking of marrying Reggie Wolfe.” This was Bella, of course. “He
+wants me to. He’s a dear boy.”
+
+“If you do, I will kill him.”
+
+“I am so very lonely,” Bella sighed. We could hear the creak of Jim’s
+shirt bosom that showed that he had sighed also. Aunt Selina had gripped
+me by the arm, and I could hear her breathing hard beside me.
+
+“It’s only Jim,” I whispered. “I--I don’t want to hear any more.”
+
+But she clutched me firmly, and the next thing we heard was another
+creak, louder and--
+
+“Get up! Get up off your knees this instant!” Bella was saying
+frantically. “Some one might come in.”
+
+“Don’t send me away,” Jim said in a smothered voice. “Every one in the
+house is asleep, and I love you, dear.”
+
+Aunt Selina swallowed hard in the darkness.
+
+“You have no right to make love to me,” Bella. “It’s--it’s highly
+improper, under the circumstances.”
+
+And then Jim: “You swallow a camel and stick at a gnat. Why did you meet
+me here, if you didn’t expect me to make love to you? I’ve stood for
+a lot, Bella, but this foolishness will have to end. Either you love
+me--or you don’t. I’m desperate.” He drew a long, forlorn breath.
+
+“Poor old Jim!” This was Bella. A pause. Then--“Let my hand alone!” Also
+Bella.
+
+“It is MY hand!”--Jim’s most fatuous tone. “THERE is where you wore
+my ring. There’s the mark still.” Sounds of Jim kissing Bella’s ring
+finger. “What did you do with it? Throw it away?” More sounds.
+
+Aunt Selina crossed the library swiftly, and again I followed. Bella
+was sitting in a low chair by the fire, looking at the logs, in the most
+exquisite negligee of pink chiffon and ribbon. Jim was on his knees,
+staring at her adoringly, and holding both her hands.
+
+“I’ll tell you a secret,” Bella was saying, looking as coy as she knew
+how--which was considerable. “I--I still wear it, on a chain around my
+neck.”
+
+On a chain around her neck! Bella, who is decollete whenever it is
+allowable, and more than is proper!
+
+That was the limit of Aunt Selina’s endurance. Still holding me, she
+stepped through the doorway and into the firelight, a fearful figure.
+
+Jim saw her first. He went quite white and struggled to get up,
+smiling a sickly smile. Bella, after her first surprise, was superbly
+indifferent. She glanced at us, raised her eyebrows, and then looked at
+the clock.
+
+“More victims of insomnia!” she said. “Won’t you come in? Jim, pull up a
+chair by the fire for your aunt.”
+
+Aunt Selina opened her mouth twice, like a fish, before she could speak.
+Then--
+
+“James, I demand that that woman leave the house!” she said hoarsely.
+
+Bella leaned back and yawned.
+
+“James, shall I go?” she asked amiably.
+
+“Nonsense,” Jim said, pulling himself together as best he could. “Look
+here, Aunt Selina, you know she can’t go out, and what’s more, I--don’t
+want her to go.”
+
+“You--what?” Aunt Selina screeched, taking a step forward. “You have the
+audacity to say such a thing to me!”
+
+Bella leaned over and gave the fire log a punch.
+
+“I was just saying that he shouldn’t say such things to me, either,”
+ she remarked pleasantly. “I’m afraid you’ll take cold, Miss Caruthers.
+Wouldn’t you like a hot sherry flip?”
+
+Aunt Selina gasped. Then she sat down heavily on one of the carved
+teakwood chairs.
+
+“He said he loved you; I heard him,” she said weakly. “He--he was going
+to put his arm around you!”
+
+“Habit!” Jim put in, trying to smile. “You see, Aunt Selina, it’s--well,
+it’s a habit I got into some time ago, and I--my arm does it without my
+thinking about it.”
+
+“Habit!” Aunt Selina repeated, her voice thick with passion. Then she
+turned to me. “Go to your room at once!” she said in her most awful
+tone. “Go to your room and leave this--this shocking affair to me.”
+
+But if she had reached her limit, so had I. If Jim chose to ruin
+himself, it was not my fault. Any one with common sense would have known
+at least to close the door before he went down on his knees, no matter
+to whom. So when Aunt Selina turned on me and pointed in the direction
+of the staircase, I did not move.
+
+“I am perfectly wide awake,” I said coldly. “I shall go to bed when I am
+entirely ready, and not before. And as for Jim’s conduct, I do not know
+much about the conventions in such cases, but if he wishes to embrace
+Miss Knowles, and she wants him to, the situation is interesting, but
+hardly novel.”
+
+Aunt Selina rose slowly and drew the folds of her dressing gown around
+her, away from the contamination of my touch.
+
+“Do you know what you are saying?” she demanded hoarsely.
+
+“I do.” I was quite white and stiff from my knees up, but below I
+was wavery. I glanced at Jim for moral support, but he was looking
+idolatrously at Bella. As for her, quite suddenly she had dropped her
+mask of indifference; her face was strained and anxious, and there were
+deep circles I had not seen before, under her eyes. And it was Bella who
+finally threw herself into the breach--the family breach.
+
+“It is all my fault, Miss Caruthers,” she said, stepping between Aunt
+Selina and myself. “I have been a blind and wicked woman, and I have
+almost wrecked two lives.”
+
+Two! What of mine?
+
+“You see,” she struggled on, against the glint in Aunt Selina’s eyes.
+“I--I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late. I did so
+many things that were cruel and wrong--oh, Jim, Jim!”
+
+She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears. I
+could hardly believe that it was Bella. And Jim put both his arms around
+her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye
+he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt
+Selina.
+
+She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.
+
+“That,” she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, “that shameful picture
+is due to your own indifference. I am not blind; I have seen how you
+rejected all his loving advances.” Bella drew away from Jim, but
+he jerked her back. “If anything in the world would reconcile me to
+divorce, it is this unbelievable situation. James, are you shameless?”
+
+But James was and didn’t care who knew it. And as there was nothing else
+to do, and no one else to do it, I stood very straight against the door
+frame, and told the whole miserable story from the very beginning. I
+told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found
+it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no
+business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands
+and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent;
+my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated
+them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own
+minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke on Aunt Selina,
+who hadn’t understood until that minute.
+
+In view of her principles, she might have been expected to turn on Jim
+and Bella, and disinherit them, and cast them out, figuratively, with
+the flaming sword of her tongue. BUT SHE DID NOT!
+
+She turned on me in the most terrible way, and asked me how I dared to
+come between husband and wife, because divorce or no divorce, whom God
+hath joined together, and so on. And when Jim picked up his courage in
+both hands and tried to interfere, she pushed him back with one hand
+while she pointed the other at me and called me a Jezebel.
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX. THE HARBISON MAN
+
+She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she
+scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being
+occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with
+Jim holding Bella’s hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be
+very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly
+clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn’t belong to her
+permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.
+
+I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her
+voice. It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.
+
+“Mr. Harbison!” Aunt Selina was saying. “Then bring him down at once,
+James. I want no more deception. There is no use cleaning a house and
+leaving a dirty corner.”
+
+“It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept,” I said,
+mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass
+her. But she planted herself squarely before me.
+
+“You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other
+people to sneeze in it,” she said grimly. And I stayed.
+
+I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or
+whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he
+was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a
+husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie,
+and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He
+was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.
+
+Jim brought him down in a dressing gown and a state of bewilderment.
+It was plain that the memory of the afternoon still rankled, for he was
+very short with Jim and inclined to resent the whole thing. The clock
+in the hall chimed half after three as they came down the stairs, and I
+heard Mr. Harbison stumble over something in the darkness and say that
+if it was a joke, he wasn’t in the humor for it. To which Jim retorted
+that it wasn’t anything resembling a joke, and for heaven’s sake not to
+walk on his feet; he couldn’t get around the furniture any faster.
+
+At the door of the den Mr. Harbison stopped, blinking in the light.
+Then, when he saw us, he tried to back himself and his dishabille out
+into the obscurity of the library. But Aunt Selina was too quick for
+him.
+
+“Come in,” she called, “I want you, young man. It seems that there are
+only two fools in the house, and you are one.”
+
+He straightened at that and looked bewildered, but he tried to smile.
+
+“I thought I was the only one,” he said. “Is it possible that there is
+another?”
+
+“I am the other,” she announced. I think she expected him to say
+“Impossible,” but, whatever he was, he was never banal.
+
+“Is that so?” he asked politely, trying to be interested and to
+understand at the same time. He had not seen me. He was gazing fixedly
+at Bella, languishing on the divan and watching him with lowered lids,
+and he had given Jim a side glance of contempt. But now he saw me and
+he colored under his tan. His neck blushed furiously, being much whiter
+than his face. He kept his eyes on mine, and I knew that he was mutely
+asking forgiveness. But the thought of what was coming paralyzed me. My
+eyes were glued to his as they had been that first evening when he had
+called me “Mrs. Wilson,” and after an instant he looked away, and his
+face was set and hard.
+
+“It seems that we have all been playing a little comedy, Mr. Harbison,”
+ Aunt Selina began, nasally sarcastic. “Or rather, you and I have been
+the audience. The rest have played.”
+
+“I--I don’t think I understand,” he said slowly. “I have seen very
+little comedy.”
+
+“It was not well planned,” Aunt Selina retorted tartly. “The idea
+was good, but the young person who was playing the part of Mrs.
+Wilson--overacted.”
+
+“Oh, come, Aunt Selina,” Jim protested, “Kit was coaxed and cajoled into
+this thing. Give me fits if you like; I deserve all I get. But let Kit
+alone--she did it for me.”
+
+Bella looked over at me and smiled nastily.
+
+“I would stop doing things for Jim, Kit,” she said. “It is SO
+unprofitable.”
+
+But Mr. Harbison harked back to Aunt Selina’s speech.
+
+“PLAYING the part of Mrs. Wilson!” he repeated. “Do you mean--?”
+
+“Exactly. Playing the part. She is not Mrs. Wilson. It seems that that
+honor belonged at one time to Miss Knowles. I believe such things are
+not unknown in New York, only why in the name of sense does a man want
+to divorce a woman and then meet her at two o’clock in the morning to
+kiss the place where his own wedding ring used to rest?”
+
+Jim fidgeted. Bella was having spasms of mirth to herself, but the
+Harbison man did not smile. He stood for a moment looking at the fire;
+then he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing gown, and
+stalked over to me. He did not care that the others were watching and
+listening.
+
+“Is it true?” he demanded, staring down at me. “You are NOT Mrs. Wilson?
+You are not married at all? All that about being neglected--and loathing
+HIM, and all that on the roof--there was no foundation of truth?”
+
+I could only shake my head without looking up. There was no defense to
+be made. Oh, I deserved the scorn in his voice.
+
+“They--they persuaded you, I suppose, and it was to help somebody? It
+was not a practical joke?”
+
+“No,” I rallied a little spirit at that. It had been anything but a
+joke.
+
+He drew a long breath.
+
+“I think I understand,” he said slowly, “but--you could have saved me
+something. I must have given you all a great deal of amusement.”
+
+“Oh, no,” I protested. “I--I want to tell you--”
+
+But he deliberately left me and went over to the door. There he turned
+and looked down at Aunt Selina. He was a little white, but there was no
+passion in his face.
+
+“Thank you for telling me all this, Miss Caruthers,” he said easily.
+“Now that you and I know, I’m afraid the others will miss their little
+diversion. Good night.”
+
+Oh, it was all right for Jim to laugh and say that he was only huffed
+a little and would be over it by morning. I knew better. There was
+something queer in his face as he went out. He did not even glance in my
+direction. He had said very little, but he had put me as effectually in
+the wrong as if he had not kissed me--deliberately kissed me--that very
+evening, on the roof.
+
+I did not go to sleep again. I lay wretchedly thinking things over and
+trying to remember who Jezebel was, and toward morning I distinctly
+heard the knob of the door turn. I mistrusted my ears, however, and so
+I got up quietly and went over in the darkness. There was no sound
+outside, but when I put my hand on the knob I felt it move under my
+fingers. The counter pressure evidently alarmed whoever it was, for the
+knob was released and nothing more happened. But by this time anything
+so uncomplicated as the fumbling of a knob at night had no power to
+disturb me. I went back to bed.
+
+
+
+Chapter XX. BREAKING OUT IN A NEW PLACE
+
+Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila Mercer had
+discovered a box of bonbons that she had forgotten, and we divided them
+around. Aunt Selina asked for the candied fruit and got it--quite a
+third of the box. We gathered in the lower hall and on the stairs and
+nibbled nauseating sweets while Mr. Harbison examined the telephone.
+
+He did not glance in my direction. Betty and Dal were helping him, and
+he seemed very cheerful. Max sat with me on the stairs. Mr. Harbison had
+just unscrewed the telephone box from the wall and was squinting into
+it, when Bella came downstairs. It was her first appearance, but as she
+was always late, nobody noticed. When she stopped, just above us on
+the stairs, however, we looked up, and she was holding to the rail and
+trembling perceptibly.
+
+“Mr. Harbison, will you--can you come upstairs?” she asked. Her voice
+was strained, almost reedy, and her lips were white.
+
+Mr. Harbison stared up at her, with the telephone box in his hands.
+
+“Why--er--certainly,” he said, “but, unless it’s very important, I’d
+like to fix this talking machine. We want to make a food record.”
+
+“I’d like to break a food record,” Max put in, but Bella created a
+diversion by sitting down suddenly on the stair just above us, and
+burying her face in her handkerchief.
+
+“Jim is sick,” she said, with a sob. “He--he doesn’t want anything to
+eat, and his head aches. He--said for me--to go away and let him die!”
+
+Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified,
+with a bonbon halfway to her mouth. For, of course, it was unexpected,
+finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the
+scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.
+
+“Sick!” Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair. “Sick! Where?”
+
+“All over,” Bella quavered. “His poor head is hot, and he’s thirsty, but
+he doesn’t want anything but water.”
+
+“Great Scott!” Dal said suddenly. “Suppose he should--Bella, are you
+telling us ALL his symptoms?”
+
+Bella put down her handkerchief and got up. From her position on the
+stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.
+
+“If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you,” she said cruelly.
+“You taunted him with being--fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped
+eating the things he should eat. And he has been exercising--on the
+roof, until he has worn himself out. And now--he is ill. He--he has a
+rash.”
+
+Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella.
+She was quite cold and scornful by that time.
+
+“A rash!” Max exclaimed. “What sort of rash?”
+
+“I did not see it,” Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up
+the stairs.
+
+There was a great deal of excitement, and nobody except Mr. Harbison was
+willing to go near Jim. He went up at once with Bella, while Max and Dal
+sat cravenly downstairs and wondered if we would all take it, and Anne
+told about a man she knew who had it, and was deaf and dumb and blind
+when he recovered.
+
+Mr. Harbison came down after a while, and said that the rash was there,
+right enough, and that Jim absolutely refused to be quarantined; that he
+insisted that he always got a rash from early strawberries and that if
+he DID have anything, since they were so touchy he hoped they would all
+get it. If they locked him in he would kick the door down.
+
+We had a long conference in the hall, with Bella sitting red-eyed and
+objecting to every suggestion we made. And finally we arranged to
+shut Jim up in one of the servants’ bedrooms with a sheet wrung out of
+disinfectant hung over the door. Bella said she would sit outside in
+the hall and read to him through the closed door, so finally he gave
+a grudging consent. But he was in an awful humor. Max and Dal put on
+rubber gloves and helped him over, and they said afterward that the way
+he talked was fearful. And there was a telephone in the maid’s room, and
+he kept asking for things every five minutes.
+
+When the doctor came he said it was too early to tell positively, and he
+ordered him liquid diet and said he would be back that evening.
+
+Which--the diet--takes me back to the famine. After they had moved Jim,
+Mr. Harbison went back to the telephone, and found everything as it
+should be. So he followed the telephone wire, and the rest followed him.
+I did not; he had systematically ignored me all morning, after having
+dared to kiss me the night before. And any other man I know, after
+looking at me the way he had looked a dozen times, would have been at
+least reasonably glad to find me free and unmarried. But it was clear
+that he was not; I wondered if he was the kind of man who always makes
+love to the other man’s wife and runs like mad when she is left a widow,
+or gets a divorce.
+
+And just when I had decided that I hated him, and that there was one man
+I knew who would never make love to a woman whom he thought married and
+then be very dignified and aloof when he found she wasn’t, I heard what
+was wrong with the telephone wire.
+
+It had been cut! Cut through with a pair of silver manicure scissors
+from the dressing table in Bella’s room, where Aunt Selina slept! The
+wire had been clipped where it came into the house, just under a window,
+and the scissors still lay on the sill.
+
+It was mysterious enough, but no one was interested in the mystery just
+then. We wanted food, and wanted it at once. Mr. Harbison fixed the
+wire, and the first thing we did, of course, was to order something to
+eat. Aunt Selina went to bed just after luncheon with indigestion, to
+the relief of every one in the house. She had been most unpleasant all
+morning.
+
+When she found herself ill, however, she insisted on having Bella, and
+that made trouble at once. We found Bella with her cheek against the
+door into Jim’s room, looking maudlin while he shouted love messages to
+her from the other side. At first she refused to stir, but after Anne
+and Max had tried and failed, the rest of us went to her in a body and
+implored her. We said Aunt Selina was in awful shape--which she was, as
+to temper--and that she had thrown a mustard plaster at Anne, which was
+true.
+
+So Bella went, grumbling, and Jim was a maniac. We had not thought it
+would be so bad for Bella, but Aunt Selina fell asleep soon after she
+took charge, holding Bella’s hand, and slept for three hours and never
+let go!
+
+About two that afternoon the sun came out, and the rest of us went
+to the roof. The sleet had melted and the air was fairly warm. Two
+housemaids dusting rugs on the top of the next house came over and
+stared at us, and somebody in an automobile down on Riverside Drive
+stood up and waved at us. It was very cheerful and hopelessly lonely.
+
+I stayed on the roof after the others had gone, and for some time I
+thought I was alone. After a while, I got a whiff of smoke, and then
+I saw Mr. Harbison far over in the corner, one foot on the parapet,
+moodily smoking a pipe. He was gazing out over the river, and paying no
+attention to me. This was natural, considering that I had hardly spoken
+to him all day.
+
+I would not let him drive me away, so I sat still, and it grew darker
+and colder. He filled his pipe now and then, but he never looked in my
+direction. Finally, however, as it grew very dusk, he knocked the ashes
+out and came toward me.
+
+“I am going to make a request, Miss McNair,” he said evenly. “Please
+keep off the roof after sunset. There are--reasons.” I had risen and was
+preparing to go downstairs.
+
+“Unless I know the reasons, I refuse to do anything of the kind,” I
+retorted. He bowed.
+
+“Then the door will be kept locked,” he rejoined, and opened it for me.
+He did not follow me, but stood watching until I was down, and I heard
+him close the roof door firmly behind me.
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI. A BAR OF SOAP
+
+Late that evening Betty Mercer and Dallas were writing verses of
+condolence to be signed by all of us and put under the door into Jim’s
+room when Bella came running down the stairs.
+
+Dal was reading the first verse when she came. “Listen to this, Bella,”
+ he said triumphantly:
+
+    “There was a fat artist named Jas,
+     Who cruelly called his friends nas.
+     When, altho’ shut up tight,
+     He broke out over night
+     With a rash that is maddening, he clas.”
+
+Then he caught sight of Bella’s face as she stood in the doorway, and
+stopped.
+
+“Jim is delirious!” she announced tragically. “You shut him in there all
+alone and now he’s delirious. I’ll never forgive any of you.”
+
+“Delirious!” everybody exclaimed.
+
+“He was sane enough when I took him his chicken broth,” Mr. Harbison
+said. “He was almost fluent.”
+
+“He is stark, staring crazy,” Bella insisted hysterically. “I--I locked
+the door carefully when I went down to my dinner, and when I came up
+it--it was unlocked, and Jim was babbling on the bed, with a sheet over
+his face. He--he says the house is haunted and he wants all the men to
+come up and sit in the room with him.”
+
+“Not on your life,” Max said. “I am young, and my career has only begun.
+I don’t intend to be cut off in the flower of my youth. But I’ll tell
+you what I will do; I’ll take him a drink. I can tie it to a pole or
+something.”
+
+But Mr. Harbison did not smile. He was thoughtful for a minute. Then:
+
+“I don’t believe he is delirious,” he said quietly, “and I wouldn’t
+be surprised if he has happened on something that--will be of general
+interest. I think I will stay with him tonight.”
+
+After that, of course, none of the others would confess that he was
+afraid, so with the South American leading, they all went upstairs. The
+women of the party sat on the lower steps and listened, but everything
+was quiet. Now and then we could hear the sound of voices, and after
+a while there was a rapid slamming of doors and the sound of some one
+running down to the second floor. Then quiet again.
+
+None of us felt talkative. Bella had followed the men up and had been
+put out, and sat sniffling by herself in the den. Aunt Selina was
+working over a jig-saw puzzle in the library, and declaring that some of
+it must be lost. Anne and Leila Mercer were embroidering, and Betty and
+I sat idle, our hands in our laps. The whole atmosphere of the house
+was mysterious. Anne told over again of the strange noises the night
+her necklace was stolen. Betty asked me about the time when the comfort
+slipped from under my fingers. And when, in the midst of the story, the
+telephone rang, we all jumped and shrieked.
+
+In an hour or so they sent for Flannigan, and he went upstairs. He came
+down again soon, however, and returned with something over his arm that
+looked like a rope. It seemed to be made of all kinds of things tied
+together, trunk straps, clothesline, bed sheets, and something that
+Flannigan pointed to with rage and said he hadn’t been able to keep his
+clothes on all day. He refused to explain further, however, and trailed
+the nondescript article up the stairs. We could only gaze after him and
+wonder what it all meant.
+
+The conclave lasted far into the night. The feminine contingent went to
+bed, but not to sleep. Some time after midnight, Mr. Harbison and Max
+went downstairs and I could hear them rattling around testing windows
+and burglar alarms. But finally every one settled down and the rest of
+the night was quiet.
+
+Betty Mercer came into my room the next morning, Sunday, and said Anne
+Brown wanted me. I went over at once, and Anne was sitting up in bed,
+crying. Dal had slipped out of the room at daylight, she said, and
+hadn’t come back. He had thought she was asleep, but she wasn’t, and
+she knew he was dead, for nothing ever made Dal get up on Sunday before
+noon.
+
+There was no one moving in the house, and I hardly knew what to do. It
+was Betty who said she would go up and rouse Mr. Harbison and Max, who
+had taken Jim’s place in the studio. She started out bravely enough, but
+in a minute we heard her flying back. Anne grew perfectly white.
+
+“He’s lying on the upper stairs!” Betty cried, and we all ran out. It
+was quite true. Dal was lying on the stairs in a bathrobe, with one of
+Jim’s Indian war clubs in his hand. And he was sound asleep.
+
+He looked somewhat embarrassed when he roused and saw us standing
+around. He said he was going to play a practical joke on somebody
+and fell asleep in the middle of it. And Anne said he wasn’t even an
+intelligent liar, and went back to bed in a temper. But Betty came in
+with me, and we sat and looked at each other and didn’t say much. The
+situation was beyond us.
+
+The doctor let Jim out the next day, there having been nothing the
+matter with him but a stomach rash. But Jim was changed; he mooned
+around Bella, of course, as before, but he was abstracted at times, and
+all that day--Sunday--he wandered off by himself, and one would come
+across him unexpectedly in the basement or along some of the unused back
+halls.
+
+Aunt Selina held service that morning. Jim said that he always had a
+prayer book, but that he couldn’t find anything with so many people
+in the house. So Aunt Selina read some religious poetry out of the
+newspapers, and gave us a valuable talk on Deception versus Honesty,
+with me as the illustration.
+
+Almost everybody took a nap after luncheon. I stayed in the den and read
+Ibsen, and felt very mournful. And after Hedda had shot herself, I lay
+down on the divan and cried a little--over Hedda; she was young and it
+was such a tragic ending--and then I fell asleep.
+
+When I wakened Mr. Harbison was standing by the table, and he held
+my book in his hands. In view of the armed neutrality between us, I
+expected to see him bow to me curtly, turn on his heel and leave the
+room. Indeed, considering his state of mind the night before, I should
+hardly have been surprised if he had thrown Hedda at my head. (This is
+not a pun. I detest them.) But instead, when he heard me move he glanced
+over at me and even smiled a little.
+
+“She wasn’t worth it,” he said, indicating the book.
+
+“Worth what?”
+
+“Your tears. You were crying over it, weren’t you?”
+
+“She was very unhappy,” I asserted indifferently. “She was married and
+she loved some one else.”
+
+“Do you really think she did?” he asked. “And even so, was that a
+reason?”
+
+“The other man cared for her; he may not have been able to help it.”
+
+“But he knew that she was married,” he said virtuously, and then he
+caught my eye and he saw the analogy instantly, for he colored hotly and
+put down the book.
+
+“Most men argue that way,” I said. “They argue by the book, and--they do
+as they like.”
+
+He picked up a Japanese ivory paper weight from the table, and stood
+balancing it across his finger.
+
+“You are perfectly right,” he said at last. “I deserve it all. My
+grievance is at myself. Your--your beauty, and the fact that I thought
+you were unhappy, put me--beside myself. It is not an excuse; it is a
+weak explanation. I will not forget myself again.”
+
+He was as abject as any one could have wished. It was my minute of
+triumph, but I can not pretend that I was happy. Evidently it had been
+only a passing impulse. If he had really cared, now that he knew I
+was free, he would have forgotten himself again at once. Then a new
+explanation occurred to me. Suppose it had been Bella all the time, and
+the real shock had been to find that she had been married!
+
+“The fault of the situation was really mine,” I said magnanimously;
+“I quite blame myself. Only, you must believe one thing. You never
+furnished us any amusement.” I looked at him sidewise. “The discovery
+that Bella and Jim were once married must have been a great shock.”
+
+“It was a surprise,” he replied evenly. His voice and his eyes were
+inscrutable. He returned my glance steadily. It was infuriating to have
+gone half-way to meet him, as I had, and then to find him intrenched in
+his self-sufficiency again. I got up.
+
+“It is unfortunate that our acquaintance has begun so unfavorably,” I
+remarked, preparing to pass him. “Under other circumstances we might
+have been friends.”
+
+“There is only one solace,” he said. “When we do not have friends, we
+can not lose them.”
+
+He opened the door to let me pass out, and as our eyes met, all the
+coldness died out of his. He held out his hand, but I was hurt. I
+refused to see it.
+
+“Kit!” he said unsteadily. “I--I’m an obstinate, pig-headed brute. I am
+sorry. Can’t we be friends, after all?”
+
+“‘When we do not have friends we can not lose them,’” I replied with
+cool malice. And the next instant the door closed behind me.
+
+It was that night that the really serious event of the quarantine
+occurred.
+
+We were gathered in the library, and everybody was deadly dull. Aunt
+Selina said she had been reared to a strict observance of the Sabbath,
+and she refused to go to bed early. The cards and card tables were put
+away and every one sat around and quarreled and was generally nasty,
+except Bella and Jim, who had gone into the den just after dinner and
+firmly closed the door.
+
+I think it was just after Max proposed to me. Yes, he proposed to me
+again that night. He said that Jim’s illness had decided him; that any
+of us might take sick and die, shut in that contaminated atmosphere, and
+that if he did he wanted it all settled. And whether I took him or not
+he wanted me to remember him kindly if anything happened. I really
+hated to refuse him--he was in such deadly earnest. But it was quite
+unnecessary for him to have blamed his refusal, as he did, on Mr.
+Harbison. I am sure I had refused him plenty of times before I had
+ever heard of the man. Yes, it was just after he proposed to me that
+Flannigan came to the door and called Mr. Harbison out into the hall.
+
+Flannigan--like most of the people in the house--always went to Mr.
+Harbison when there was anything to be done. He openly adored him,
+and--what was more--he did what Mr. Harbison ordered without a word,
+while the rest of us had to get down on our knees and beg.
+
+Mr. Harbison went out, muttering something about a storm coming up, and
+seeing that the tent was secure. Betty Mercer went with him. She had
+been at his heels all evening, and called him “Tom” on every possible
+occasion. Indeed, she made no secret of it; she said that she was mad
+about him, and that she would love to live in South America, and have
+an Indian squaw for a lady’s maid, and sit out on the veranda in the
+evenings and watch the Southern Cross shooting across the sky, and eat
+tropical food from the quaint Indian pottery. She was not even daunted
+when Dal told her the Southern Cross did not shoot, and that the food
+was probably canned corn on tin dishes.
+
+So Betty went with him. She wore a pale yellow dinner gown, with just a
+sophisticated touch of black here and there, and cut modestly square in
+the neck. Her shoulders are scrawny. And after they were gone--not her
+shoulders; Mr. Harbison and she--Aunt Selina announced that the next day
+was Monday, that she had only a week’s supply of clothing with her, and
+that no policeman who ever swung a mace should wash her undergarments
+for her.
+
+She paused a moment, but nobody offered to do it. Anne was reading De
+Maupassant under cover of a table, and the rest pretended not to hear.
+After a pause, Aunt Selina got up heavily and went upstairs, coming down
+soon after with a bundle covered with a green shawl, and with a white
+balbriggan stocking trailing from an opening in it. She paused at the
+library door, surveyed the inmates, caught my unlucky eye and beckoned
+to me with a relentless forefinger.
+
+“We can put them to soak tonight,” she confided to me, “and tomorrow
+they will be quite simple to do. There is no lace to speak of”--Dal
+raised his eyebrows--“and very little flouncing.”
+
+Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry. It never occurred to any one that
+Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges--such as
+they were--and assumed none of my obligations. Aunt Selina and I went to
+the laundry.
+
+It is strange what big things develop from little ones. In this case it
+was a bar of soap. And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should
+have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it
+would have developed sooner. The two most unexpected events of the whole
+quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one
+in the cellar. The cellar one, although curious, was not so serious as
+the other, so it comes first.
+
+Aunt Selina put her clothes in a tub in the laundry and proceeded
+to dress them like a vegetable. She threw in a handful of salt, some
+kerosene oil and a little ammonia. The result was villainous, but after
+she tasted it--or snuffed it--she said it needed a bar of soap cut up to
+give it strength--or flavor--and I went into the store room for it.
+
+The laundry soap was in a box. I took in a silver fork, for I hated to
+touch the stuff, and jabbed a bar successfully in the semi-darkness.
+Then I carried it back to the laundry and dropped it on the table. Aunt
+Selina looked at the fork with disgust; then we both looked at the soap.
+ONE SIDE OF IT WAS COVERED WITH ROUND HOLES THAT CURVED AROUND ON EACH
+OTHER LIKE A COILED SNAKE.
+
+I ran back to the store room, and there, a little bit sticky and
+smelling terribly of rosin, lay Anne’s pearl necklace!
+
+I was so excited that I seized Aunt Selina by the hands and danced her
+all over the place. Then I left her, trying to find her hair pins on the
+floor, and ran up to tell the others. I met Betty in the hall and waved
+the pearls at her. But she did not notice them.
+
+“Is Mr. Harbison down there?” she asked breathlessly. “I left him on the
+roof and went down to my room for my scarf, and when I went back he
+had disappeared. He--he doesn’t seem to be in the house.” She tried
+to laugh, but her voice was shaky. “He couldn’t have got down without
+passing me, anyhow,” she supplemented. “I suppose I’m silly, but so many
+queer things have happened, Kit.”
+
+“I wouldn’t worry, Betty,” I soothed her. “He is big enough to take care
+of himself. And with the best intentions in the world, you can’t have
+him all the time, you know.”
+
+She was too much startled to be indignant. She followed me into the
+library, where the sight of the pearls produced a tremendous excitement,
+and then every one had to go down to the store room, and see where the
+necklace had been hidden, and Max examined all the bars of soap for
+thumb prints.
+
+Mr. Harbison did not appear. Max commented on the fact caustically,
+but Dal hushed him up. And so, Anne hugging her pearls, and Aunt Selina
+having put a final seasoning of washing powder on the clothes in the
+tub, we all went upstairs to bed. It had been a long day, and the
+morning would at least bring bridge.
+
+I was almost ready for bed when Jim tapped at my door. I had been very
+cool to him since the night in the library when I was publicly staked
+and martyred, and he was almost cringing when I opened the door.
+
+“What is it now?” I asked cruelly. “Has Bella tired of it already, or
+has somebody else a rash?”
+
+“Don’t be a shrew, Kit,” he said. “I don’t want you to do anything. I
+only--when did you see Harbison last?”
+
+“If you mean ‘last,’” I retorted, “I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of
+him yet.” Then I saw that he was really worried. “Betty was leading him
+to the roof,” I added. “Why? Is he missing?”
+
+“He isn’t anywhere in the house. Dal and I have been over every inch
+of it.” Max had come up, in a dressing gown, and was watching me
+insolently.
+
+“I think we have seen the last of him,” he said. “I’m sorry, Kit, to nip
+the little romance in the bud. The fellow was crazy about you--there’s
+no doubt of it. But I’ve been watching him from the beginning, and I
+think I’m upheld. Whether he went down the water spout, or across a
+board to the next house--”
+
+“I--I dislike him intensely,” I said angrily, “but you would not dare to
+say that to his face. He could strangle you with one hand.”
+
+Max laughed disagreeably.
+
+“Well, I only hope he is gone,” he threw at me over his shoulder, “I
+wouldn’t want to be responsible to your father if he had stayed.” I was
+speechless with wrath.
+
+They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house. At
+one o’clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had not been
+found. I did not see how they could go to bed at all. If he had escaped,
+then Max was right and the whole thing was heart-breaking. And if he had
+not, then he might be lying--
+
+I got up and dressed.
+
+The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to the roof
+it was clear starlight. The wind blew through the electric wires
+strung across and set them singing. The occasional bleat of a belated
+automobile on the drive below came up to me raucously. The tent gleamed,
+a starlit ghost of itself, and the boxwoods bent in the breeze. I went
+over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it. I had done the
+same thing so often before; I had carried all my times of stress so
+infallibly to that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned
+there.
+
+And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy, and I
+loathed my part in it. He had been perfectly right to be angry with me
+and with all of us. And I had been a hypocrite and a Pharisee, and had
+thanked God that I was not as other people, when the fact was that I was
+worse than the worst. And although it wasn’t dignified to think of him
+going down the drain pipe, still--no one could blame him for wanting to
+get away from us, and he was quite muscular enough to do it.
+
+I was in the depths of self-abasement when I heard a sound behind me. It
+was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan. I gripped the
+parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came
+again.
+
+I was terribly frightened. Then--I don’t know how I did it, but I was
+across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against
+the chimney. And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost
+entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.
+
+His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his
+face. It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with
+blood.
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII. IT WAS DELIRIUM
+
+I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and
+called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over
+me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.
+
+They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the
+tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth. But
+he could not swallow. And the silence became more and more ominous until
+finally Anne got hysterical and cried, “He is dead! Dead!” and collapsed
+on the roof.
+
+But he was not. Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings
+around them and Jim’s voice came from away across the river, somebody
+said, “There, he swallowed that,” and soon after, he opened his eyes. He
+muttered something that sounded like “Andean pinnacle” and lapsed into
+unconsciousness again. But he was not dead! He was not dead!
+
+When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim’s six-foot
+canvases--it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next
+day--and took him down to the studio. We made it as much like a
+sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable. But he lay
+without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant
+and a trained nurse.
+
+The nurse was an offensively capable person. She put us all out, and
+scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room--although Anne
+explained that it is very reviving. And she said that it was unnecessary
+to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating
+the patient. She was good-looking, too. I disliked her at once. Any
+one could see by the way she took his pulse--just letting his poor hand
+hang, without any support--that she was a purely mechanical creature,
+without heart.
+
+Well, as I said before, she put us all out, and shut the door, and asked
+us not to whisper outside. Then, too, she refused to allow any flowers
+in the room, although Betty had got a florist out of bed to order some.
+
+The consultant came, stayed an hour, and left. Aunt Selina, who proved
+herself a trump in that trying time, waylaid him in the hall, and
+he said it might be a fractured skull, although it was possibly only
+concussion.
+
+The men spent most of the morning together in the den, with the door
+shut. Now and then one of them would tiptoe upstairs, ask the nurse how
+her patient was doing, and creak down again. Just before noon they all
+went to the roof and examined again the place where he had been found.
+I know, for I was in the upper hall outside the studio. I stayed there
+almost all day, and after a while the nurse let me bring her things as
+she needed them. I don’t know why mother didn’t let me study nursing--I
+always wanted to do it. And I felt helpless and childish now, when there
+were things to be done.
+
+Max came down from the roof alone, and I cornered him in the upper hall.
+
+“I’m going crazy, Max,” I said. “Nobody will tell me anything, and I
+can’t stand it. How was he hurt? Who hurt him?”
+
+Max looked at me quite a long time.
+
+“I’m darned if I understand you, Kit,” he said gravely. “You said you
+disliked Harbison.”
+
+“So I do--I did,” I supplemented. “But whether I like him or not has
+nothing to do with it. He has been injured--perhaps murdered”--I choked
+a little. “Which--which of you did it?”
+
+Max took my hand and held it, looking down at me.
+
+“I wish you could have cared for me like that,” he said gently. “Dear
+little girl, we don’t know who hurt him. I didn’t, if that’s what you
+mean. Perhaps a flower pot--”
+
+I began to cry then, and he drew me to him and let me cry on his arm. He
+stood very quietly, patting my head in a brotherly way and behaving very
+well, save that once he said:
+
+“Don’t cry too long, Kit; I can stand only a certain amount.”
+
+And just then the nurse opened the door to the studio, and with Max’s
+arm still around me, I raised my head and looked in.
+
+Mr. Harbison was conscious. His eyes were open, and he was staring at us
+both as we stood framed by the doorway.
+
+He lay back at once and closed his eyes, and the nurse shut the door.
+There was no use, even if I had been allowed in, in trying to explain
+to him. To attempt such a thing would have been to presume that he was
+interested in an explanation. I thought bitterly to myself as I brought
+the nurse cracked ice and struggled to make beef tea in the kitchen,
+that lives had been wrecked on less.
+
+Dal was allowed ten minutes in the sick room during the afternoon, and
+he came out looking puzzled and excited. He refused to tell us what he
+had learned, however, and the rest of the afternoon he and Jim spent in
+the cellar.
+
+The day dragged on. Downstairs people ate and read and wrote letters,
+and outside newspaper men talked together and gazed over at the house
+and photographed the doctors coming in and the doctors going out. As for
+me, in the intervals of bringing things, I sat in Bella’s chair in the
+upper hall, and listened to the crackle of the nurse’s starched skirts.
+
+At midnight that night the doctors made a thorough examination. When
+they came out they were smiling.
+
+“He is doing very well,” the younger one said--he was hairy and dark,
+but he was beautiful to me. “He is entirely conscious now, and in about
+an hour you can send the nurse off for a little sleep. Don’t let him
+talk.”
+
+And so at last I went through the familiar door into an unfamiliar room,
+with basins and towels and bottles around, and a screen made of Jim’s
+largest canvases. And someone on the improvised bed turned and looked
+at me. He did not speak, and I sat down beside him. After a while he put
+his hand over mine as it lay on the bed.
+
+“You are much better to me than I deserve,” he said softly. And because
+his eyes were disconcerting, I put an ice cloth over them.
+
+“Much better than you deserve,” I said, and patted the ice cloth to
+place gently. He fumbled around until he found my hand again, and we
+were quiet for a long time. I think he dozed, for he roused suddenly and
+pulled the cloth from his eyes.
+
+“The--the day is all confused,” he said, turning to look at me,
+“but--one thing seems to stand out from everything else. Perhaps it
+was delirium, but I seemed to see that door over there open, and you,
+outside, with--with Max. His arms were around you.”
+
+“It was delirium,” I said softly. It was my final lie in that house of
+mendacity.
+
+He drew a satisfied breath, and lifting my hand, held it to his lips and
+kissed it.
+
+“I can hardly believe it is you,” he said. “I have to hold firmly to
+your hand or you will disappear. Can’t you move your chair closer? You
+are miles away.” So I did it, for he was not to be excited.
+
+After a little--
+
+“It’s awfully good of you to do this. I have been desperately sorry,
+Kit, about the other night. It was a ruffianly thing to do--to kiss you,
+when I thought--”
+
+“You are to keep very still,” I reminded him. He kissed my hand again,
+but he persisted.
+
+“I was mad--crazy.” I tried to give him some medicine, but he pushed the
+spoon aside. “You will have to listen,” he said. “I am in the depths of
+self-disgust. I--I can’t think of anything else. You see, you seemed
+so convinced that I was the blackguard that somehow nothing seemed to
+matter.”
+
+“I have forgotten it all,” I declared generously, “and I would be quite
+willing to be friends, only, you remember you said--”
+
+“Friends!” his voice was suddenly reckless, and he raised on his elbow.
+“Friends! Who wants to be friends? Kit, I was almost delirious that
+night. The instant I held you in my arms--It was all over. I loved you
+the first time I saw you. I--I suppose I’m a fool to talk like this.”
+
+And, of course, just then Dallas had to open the door and step into the
+room. He was covered with dirt and he had a hatchet in his hand.
+
+“A rope!” he demanded, without paying any attention to us and diving
+into corners of the room. “Good heavens, isn’t there a rope in this
+confounded house!”
+
+He turned and rushed out, without any explanation, and left us staring
+at the door.
+
+“Bother the rope!” I found myself forced to look into two earnest eyes.
+“Kit, were you VERY angry when I kissed you that night on the roof?”
+
+“Very,” I maintained stoutly.
+
+“Then prepare yourself for another attack of rage!” he said. And Betty
+opened the door.
+
+She had on a fetching pale blue dressing gown, and one braid of her
+yellow hair was pulled carelessly over her shoulder. When she saw me
+on my knees beside the bed (oh, yes, I forgot to say that, quite
+unconsciously, I had slid into that position) she stopped short, just
+inside the door, and put her hand to her throat. She stood for quite a
+perceptible time looking at us, and I tried to rise. But Tom shamelessly
+put his arm around my shoulders and held me beside him. Then Betty
+took a step back and steadied herself by the door frame. She had really
+cared, I knew then, but I was too excited to be sorry for her.
+
+“I--I beg your pardon for coming in,” she said nervously. “But--they
+want you downstairs, Kit. At least, I thought you would want to go,
+but--perhaps--”
+
+Just then from the lower part of the house came a pandemonium of noises;
+women screaming, men shouting, and the sound of hatchet strokes and
+splintering wood. I seized Betty by the arm, and together we rushed down
+the stairs.
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII. COMING
+
+The second floor was empty. A table lay overturned at the top of the
+stairs, and a broken flower vase was weltering in its own ooze. Part way
+down Betty stepped on something sharp, that proved to be the Japanese
+paper knife from the den. I left her on the stairs examining her foot
+and hurried to the lower floor.
+
+Here everything was in the utmost confusion. Aunt Selina had fainted,
+and was sitting in a hall chair with her head rolled over sidewise and
+the poker from the library fireplace across her knees. No one was paying
+any attention to her. And Jim was holding the front door open, while
+three of the guards hesitated in the vestibule. The noises continued
+from the back of the house, and as I stood on the lowest stair Bella
+came out from the dining room, with her face streaked with soot, and
+carrying a kettle of hot water.
+
+“Jim,” she called wildly. “While Max and Dal are below, you can pour
+this down from the top. It’s boiling.”
+
+Jim glanced back over his shoulder. “Carry out your own murderous
+designs,” he said. And then, as she started back with it, “Bella, for
+Heaven’s sake,” he called, “have you gone stark mad? Put that kettle
+down.”
+
+She did it sulkily and Jim turned to the policeman.
+
+“Yes, I know it was a false alarm before,” he explained patiently, “but
+this is genuine. It is just as I tell you. Yes, Flannigan is in the
+house somewhere, but he’s hiding, I guess. We could manage the thing
+very well ourselves, but we have no cartridges for our revolvers.” Then
+as the noise from the rear redoubled, “If you don’t come in and help, I
+will telephone for the fire department,” he concluded emphatically.
+
+I ran to Aunt Selina and tried to straighten her head. In a moment she
+opened her eyes, sat up and stared around her. She saw the kettle at
+once.
+
+“What are you doing with boiling water on the floor?” she said to me,
+with her returning voice. “Don’t you know you will spoil the floor?” The
+ruling passion was strong with Aunt Selina, as usual.
+
+I could not find out the trouble from any one; people appeared and
+disappeared, carrying strange articles. Anne with a rope, Dal with his
+hatchet, Bella and the kettle, but I could get a coherent explanation
+from no one. When the guards finally decided that Jim was in earnest,
+and that the rest of us were not crawling out a rear window while he
+held them at the door, they came in, three of them and two reporters,
+and Jim led them to the butler’s pantry.
+
+Here we found Anne, very white and shaky, with the pantry table and two
+chairs piled against the door of the kitchen slide, and clutching the
+chamois-skin bag that held her jewels. She had a bottle of burgundy open
+beside her, and was pouring herself a glass with shaking hands when we
+appeared. She was furious at Jim.
+
+“I very nearly fainted,” she said hysterically. “I might have been
+murdered, and no one would have cared. I wish they would stop that
+chopping, I’m so nervous I could scream.”
+
+Jim took the Burgundy from her with one hand and pointed the police to
+the barricaded door with the other.
+
+“That is the door to the dumb-waiter shaft,” he said. “The lower one
+is fastened on the inside, in some manner. The noises commenced about
+eleven o’clock, while Mr. Brown was on guard. There were scraping sounds
+first, and later the sound of a falling body. He roused Mr. Reed and
+myself, but when we examined the shaft everything was quiet, and dark.
+We tried lowering a candle on a string, but--it was extinguished from
+below.”
+
+The reporters were busily removing the table and chairs from the door.
+
+“If you have a rope handy,” one of them said, “I will go down the
+shaft.”
+
+(Dal says that all reporters should have been policemen, and that all
+policemen are natural newsgatherers.)
+
+“The cage appears to be stuck, half-way between the floors,” Jim said.
+“They are cutting through the door in the kitchen below.”
+
+They opened the door then and cautiously peered down, but there was
+nothing to be seen. I touched Jim gingerly on the arm.
+
+“Is it--is it Flannigan,” I asked, “shut in there?”
+
+“No--yes--I don’t know,” he returned absently. “Run along and don’t
+bother, Kit. He may take to shooting any minute.”
+
+Anne and I went out then and shut the door, and went into the dining
+room and sat on our feet, for of course the bullets might come up
+through the floor. Aunt Selina joined us there, and Bella, and the
+Mercer girls, and we sat around and talked in whispers, and Leila Mercer
+told of the time her grandfather had had a struggle with an escaped
+lunatic.
+
+In the midst of the excitement Tom appeared in a bathrobe, looking
+very pale, with a bandage around his head, and the nurse at his heels
+threatening to leave and carrying a bottle of medicine and a spoon. He
+went immediately to the pantry, and soon we could hear him giving orders
+and the rest hurrying around to obey them. The hammering ceased, and the
+silence was even worse. It was more suggestive.
+
+In about fifteen minutes there was a thud, as if the cage had fallen,
+and the sound of feet rushing down the cellar stairs. Then there were
+groans and loud oaths, and everybody talking at once, below, and the
+sound of a struggle. In the dining room we all sat bent forward, with
+straining ears and quickened breath, until we distinctly heard someone
+laugh. Then we knew that, whatever it was, it was over, and nobody was
+killed.
+
+The sounds came closer, were coming up the stairs and into the pantry.
+Then the door swung open, and Tom and a policeman appeared in the
+doorway, with the others crowding behind. Between them they supported
+a grimy, unshaven object, covered with whitewash from the wall of the
+shaft, an object that had its hands fastened together with handcuffs,
+and that leered at us with a pair of the most villainously crossed eyes
+I have ever seen.
+
+None of us had ever seen him before.
+
+“Mr. Lawrence McGuirk, better known as Tubby,’” Tom said cheerfully.
+“A celebrity in his particular line, which is second-story man and
+all-round rascal. A victim of the quarantine, like ourselves.”
+
+“We’ve missed him for a week,” one of the guards said with a grin.
+“We’ve been real anxious about you, Tubby. Ain’t a week goes by, when
+you’re in health, that we don’t hear something of you.”
+
+Mr. McGuirk muttered something under his breath, and the men chuckled.
+
+“It seems,” Tom said, interpreting, “that he doesn’t like us much. He
+doesn’t like the food, and he doesn’t like the beds. He says just when
+he got a good place fixed up in the coal cellar, Flannigan found it, and
+is asleep there now, this minute.”
+
+Aunt Selina rose suddenly and cleared her throat.
+
+“Am I to understand,” she asked severely, “that from now on we will have
+to add two newspaper reporters, three policemen and a burglar to the
+occupants of this quarantined house? Because, if that is the case, I
+absolutely refuse to feed them.”
+
+But one of the reporters stepped forward and bowed ceremoniously.
+
+“Madam,” he said, “I thank you for your kind invitation, but--it will
+be impossible for us to accept. I had intended to break the good news
+earlier, but this little game of burglar-in-a-corner prevented me. The
+fact is, your Jap has been discovered to have nothing more serious than
+chicken-pox, and--if you will forgive a poultry yard joke, there is no
+longer any necessity for your being cooped up.”
+
+Then he retired, quite pleased with himself.
+
+One would have thought we had exhausted our capacity for emotion, but
+Jim said a joyful emotion was so new that we hardly knew how to receive
+it. Every one shook hands with every one else, and even the nurse shared
+in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine she had prepared for Tom.
+
+Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were waiting
+for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk. He was still quite
+shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck. The wine cheered
+him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from
+disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.
+
+He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in
+one of the maids’ rooms--the one where we had put Jim. It was Jim waking
+out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and
+that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had
+roused the suspicions of the men in the house--and he slept at night on
+the coal in the cellar. He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand
+over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn’t had a shave for a week. He
+took somebody’s razor, he said, but he couldn’t get hold of a portable
+mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in
+the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide.
+He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the board on the roof, of
+the home-made rope, and the hole in the cellar, and he spoke feelingly
+of the pearl collar and the struggle he had made to hide it. He said
+that for three days it was concealed in the pocket of Jim’s old smoking
+coat in the studio.
+
+We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him uncomfortable,
+think of what he had done to us. And for him to tell, as he did later in
+court, that if that was high society he would rather be a burglar, and
+that we starved him, and that the women had to dress each other because
+they had no lady’s maids, and that the whole lot of us were in love with
+one man, it was downright malicious.
+
+The wagon came for him just as he finished his story, and we all went
+to the door. In the vestibule Aunt Selina suddenly remembered something,
+and she stepped forward and caught the poor fellow by the arm.
+
+“Young man,” she said grimly. “I’ll thank you to return what you took
+from ME last Tuesday night.”
+
+McGuirk stared, then shuddered and turned suddenly pale.
+
+“Good Lord!” he ejaculated. “On the stairs to the roof! YOU?”
+
+They led him away then, quite broken, with Aunt Selina staring after
+him. She never did understand. I could have explained, but it was too
+awful.
+
+On the steps McGuirk turned and took a farewell glance at us. Then he
+waved his hand to the policemen and reporters who had gathered around.
+
+“Goodby, fellows,” he called feebly. “I ain’t sorry, I ain’t. Jail’ll be
+a paradise after this.”
+
+And then we went to pack our trunks.
+
+NOTE FROM MAX WHICH CAME THE NEXT DAY WITH ITS ENCLOSURE.
+
+My Dear Kit--The enclosed trunk tag was used on my trunk, evidently by
+mistake. Higgins discovered it when he was unpacking and returned it
+to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I
+suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the
+courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who
+doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask
+him not to leave another one around where I will come across it. Max.
+
+WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE TRUNK TAG.
+
+Don’t you know that I won’t see you until tomorrow? For Heaven’s sake,
+get away from this crowd and come into the den. If you don’t I will kiss
+you before everybody. Are you coming? T.
+
+WRITTEN BELOW.
+
+No indeed. K.
+
+THIS WAS SCRATCHED OUT AND BENEATH.
+
+Coming.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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