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+Project Gutenberg Etext of When a Man Marries, by Mary Rinehart
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+When a Man Marries
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+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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+March, 1999  [Etext #1671]
+[Date last updated: February 3, 2005]
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+
+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 Etext of When a Man Marries, by Mary Rinehart
+
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