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RAINY WEEK

BY

ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

AUTHOR OF "OLD-DAD," "PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD-WILL, TO DOGS," ETC.

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1921, By E. P. Button & Company

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

RAINY WEEK

CHAPTER I

IN the changes and chances of our New England climate it is not so
much what a Guest can endure outdoors as what he can originate
indoors that endears him most to a weather-worried Host.

Take Rollins, for instance, a small man, dour, insignificant--a
prude in the moonlight, a duffer at sailing, a fool at tennis--yet
once given a rain-patter and a smoky fireplace, of an audacity so
impertinent, so altogether absurd, that even yawns must of necessity
turn to laughter--or curses. The historic thunderstorm question,
for instance, which he sprang at the old Bishop's house-party after
five sweltering days of sunshine and ecclesiastical argument: "Who
was the last person you kissed before you were married?"

A question innocent as milk if only swallowed! But unswallowed?
Gurgled? Spat like venom from Bishop to Bishop? And from Bishop's
Wife to Bishop's Wife? Oh la! Yet that Rollins himself was the only
unmarried person present on that momentous occasion shows not at
all, I still contend, the slightest "natural mendacity" of the man,
but merely the perfectly normal curiosity of a confirmed Anchoret
to learn what truths he may from those who have been fortunate--or
unfortunate enough to live.

Certainly neither my Husband nor myself would ever dream of running
a house-party without Rollins!

Yet equally certain it is not at all on Rollins's account but
distinctly on our own that we invariably set the date for our
annual house-party in the second week of May.

For twenty years, in the particular corner of the New England
sea-coast which my husband and I happen to inhabit, it has never,
with one single exception only, failed to rain from morning till
night and night till morning again through the second week of May!

With all weather-uncertainties thus settled perfectly definitely,
even for the worst, it is a comparatively easy matter for any Host
and Hostess to _Stage_ such events as remain. It is with purely
confessional intent that I emphasize that word "stage." Every human
being acknowledges, if honest, some one supreme passion of
existence. My Husband's and mine is for what Highbrows call "the
experimental drama."

We call it "Amateur Theatricals."

Yet even this innocent passion has not proved a serene one!

After inestimable seasons of devotion to that most ruthless of all
goddesses, the Goddess of Amateur Theatricals, involving, as it
does, wrangles with

Guests who refuse to accept unless they areassured that there will
be a Play,

wrangles with

Guests who refuse to accept unless assured that there will not be a
Play,

wrangles with

Guests already arrived, unpacked, tubbed, seated at dinner, who
discover suddenly that their lines are too long,

wrangles with

Guests already arrived, unpacked, tubbed, seated at dinner, who
discover equally suddenly that their lines are too short.

wrangles with

Guests who "can't possibly play in blue."

wrangles with

Guests who "can't possibly play in pink."

wrangles with

Guests who insist upon kissing in every act.

wrangles with

Guests who refuse to kiss in any act, it was my Husband's ingenious
idea to organize instead an annual Play that should never dream it
was a Play, acted by actors who never even remotely suspected that
they were acting, evolving a plot that no one but the Almighty,
Himself, could possibly foreordain.

We call this Play "_Rainy Week_."

Yet, do not, I implore you, imagine for a moment that by any such
simple little trick as shifting all blame to the weather, all
praise to the Almighty, _Care_ has been eliminated from the
enterprise.

It is only indeed at the instigation of this trick that the real
hazard begins. For a Play after all is only a Play, be it humorous,
amorous, murderous, adulterous,--a soap-bubble world combusting
spontaneously of its own effervescence. But life is life and
starkly real if not essentially earnest. And the merest flicker of
the merest eyelid in one of life's real emotions has short-circuited
long ere this with the eternities themselves! It's just this chance
of "short-circuiting with the eternities" that shifts the pucker
from a Host's brow to his spine!

No lazy, purring, reunion of old friends this _Rainy Week_ of ours,
you understand? No dully congenial convocation of in-bred
relatives? No conference on literature,--music,--painting? No
symposium of embroidery stitches? Nor of billiard shots? But the
deliberate and relentlessly-planned assemblage of such distinctly
diverse types of men and women as prodded by unusual conditions of
weather, domicile, and propinquity, will best act and re-act upon
each other in terms inevitably dramatic, though most naively
unrehearsed!

"Vengeance is mine!" said the Lord. "Very considerable psychologic,
as well as dramatic satisfaction is now at last ours!" confess your
humble servants.

In this very sincere if somewhat whimsical dramatic adventure of
_Rainy Week_, the exigencies of our household demand that the
number of actors shall be limited to eight.

Barring the single exception of Husband and Wife no two people are
invited who have ever seen each other before. Destiny plays very
much more interesting tricks we have noticed with perfect strangers
than she does with perfect friends!

Barring nothing no one is ever warned that the week will be rainy.
It is astonishing how a guest's personality strips itself right
down to the bare sincerities when he is forced unexpectedly to doff
his extra-selected, super-fitting, ultra-becoming visiting clothes
for a frankly nondescript costume chosen only for its becomingness
to a--situation! In this connection, however, it is only fair to
ourselves to attest that following the usual managerial custom of
furnishing from its own pocket such costumes as may not for bizarre
or historical reasons be readily  converted by a cast to street and
church wear, we invariably provide the _Rainy Week_ costumes for
our cast. This costume consists of one yellow oil-skin suit or
"slicker," one yellow oil-skin hat, one pair of rubber boots. One
dark blue jersey. And very warm woolen stockings.

Reverting also to dramatic sincerity no professional manager
certainly ever chose his cast more conscientiously than does my
purely whimsical Husband!

After several years of experiment and readjustment the ultimate
cast of _Rainy Week_ is fixed as follows:

A Bride and Groom

One Very Celibate Person

Someone With a Past

Someone With a Future

A Singing Voice

A May Girl

And a Bore. (Rollins, of course, figuring as the Bore.)

Always there must be that Bride and Groom (for the Celibate Person
to wonder about). And the Very Celibate Person (for the Bride and
Groom to wonder about). Male or Female, one Brave Soul who had
Rebuilt Ruin. Male or Female, one Intrepid Brain that Dares to
Boast of Having Made Tryst with the Future. Soprano, Alto, Bass or
Tenor, one Singing Voice that can Rip the Basting Threads out of
Serenity. One Young Girl so May-Blossomy fresh and new that
Everybody Instinctively Changes the Subject When She Comes into the
Room . . . . And Rollins!

To be indeed absolutely explicit experience has proved, with an
almost chemical accuracy, that, quite regardless of "age, sex, or
previous condition of servitude," this particular combination of

Romantic Passion

Psychic Austerity

Tragedy

Ambition

Poignancy

Innocence

And Irritation

cannot be housed together for even one Rainy Week without producing
drama!

But whether that drama be farce or fury--? Whether he who came to
_star_ remains to _supe_? Who yet shall prove the hero? And who the
villain! Who--? Oh, la! It's God's business now!

"All the more reason," affirms my Husband, "why all such details as
light and color effects, eatments, drinkments and guest-room
reading matter should be attended to with extra conscientiousness."

Already through a somewhat sensational motor collision in the gay
October Berkshires we had acquired the tentative Bride and Groom,
Paul Brenswick and Victoria Meredith, as ardent and unreasonable a
pair of young lovers as ever rose unscathed from a shivered racing
car to face, instead of annihilation, a mere casual separation of
months until such May-time as Paul himself, returning from Heaven
knows what errand in China, should mate with her and meet with us.

And to New York City, of course, one would turn instinctively for
the Someone With a Future. At a single round of studio parties in
the brief Thanksgiving Holiday we found Claude Kennilworth. Not a
moment's dissension occurred between us concerning his absolute
fitness for the part. He was beautiful to look at, and not too
young, twenty-five perhaps, the approximate age of our tentative
Bride and Groom. And he made things with his hands in dough, clay,
plaster, anything he could reach very insolently, all the time you
were talking to him, modeling the thing he was thinking about,
instead!

"Oh, just wait till you see him in bronze?" thrilled all the young
Satellites around him.

"Till you see me in bronze!" thrilled young Kennilworth himself.

Never in all my life have I beheld anyone as beautiful as Claude
Kennilworth--with a bit of brag in him! That head sharply uplifted,
the pony-like forelock swished like smoke across his flaming eyes,
the sudden wild pulse of his throat. Heavens! What a boy!

"You artist-fellows are forever reproducing solids with liquids,"
remarked my Husband quite casually. "All the effects I mean! All
the illusion! Crag or cathedral out of a dime-sized mud-puddle in
your water-color box! Flesh you could kiss from a splash of
turpentine! But can you reproduce liquids with solids? Could you
put the ocean into bronze, I mean?"

"The ocean?" screamed the Satellites.

"No mere skinny bas-relief," mused my Husband, "of the front of a
wave hitched to the front of a wharf or the front of a beach but
waves corporeally complete and all alone--shoreless--skyless--like
the model of a village an ocean rolling all alone as it were in the
bulk of its three dimensions?"

"In--bronze?" questions young Kennilworth. "_Bronze_?" His voice
was very faintly raspish.

"Oh, it wasn't a blue ocean especially that I was thinking about,"
confided my Husband, genially, through the mist of his cigarette.
"Any chance pick-up acquaintance has seen the ocean when it's blue.
But my wife and I, you understand, we live with the ocean!
Call it by its first name,--'Oh Ocean!'--and all that sort of
thing!" he smiled out abruptly above the sudden sharp spurt of
a freshly-struck match. "The--the ocean I was thinking of," he
resumed with an almost exaggerated monotone, "was a brown
ocean--brown as boiled sea-weeds--mad as mud under a leaden
sky--seething--souring--perfectly lusterless--every brown
billow-top pinched-up as though by some malevolent hand into
a vivid verdigris bruise----"

"But however in the world would one know where to begin?" giggled
the Satellites. "Or how to break it off so it wouldn't end like the
edge of a tin roof! Even if you started all right with a nice
molten wave? What about the--last wave? The problem of the horizon
sense? Yes! What about the horizon sense?" shouted everybody at
once.

From the shadowy sofa-pillowed corner just behind the supper table,
young Kennilworth's face glowed suddenly into view. But a minute
before I could have sworn that a girl's cheek lay against his. Yet
now as he jumped to his feet the feminine glove that dropped from
his fidgety fingers was twisted with extraordinary maliciousness, I
noted, into a doll-sized caricature of a "Vamp."

"I could put the ocean into bronze, Mr. Delville," he said, "if
anybody would give me a chance!"

Perhaps it was just this very ease and excitement of having booked
anyone as perfect as young Kennilworth for the part of Someone with
a Future that made me act as impulsively as I did regarding Ann
Woltor.

We were sitting in our room in a Washington hotel before a very
smoky fireplace one rather cross night in late January when I
confided the information to my Husband.

"Oh, by the way, Jack," I said quite abruptly, "I've invited Ann
Woltor for Rainy Week."

"Invited whom?" questioned my Husband above the rim of his
newspaper.

"Ann Woltor," I repeated.

"Ann--what?" persisted my Husband.

"Ann Woltor," I re-emphasized.

"Who's she?" quickened my Husband's interest very faintly.

"Oh, she's a woman," I explained--"or a Girl--that I've been
meeting 'most every day this last month at my hair-dresser's. She
runs the accounts there or something and tries to keep everybody
pacified. And reads the darndest books, all highbrow stuff. You'd
hardly expect it! Oh, not modern highbrow, I mean, essays as bawdy
as novels, but the old, serene highbrow,--Emerson and Pater and
Wordsworth,--books that smell of soap and lavender, as well as
brains. Reads 'em as though she liked 'em, I mean! Comes from New
Zealand I've been told. Really, she's rather remarkable!"

"Must be!" said my Husband. "To come all the way from New Zealand
to land in your hair-dresser's library!"

"It isn't my hair-dresser's library!" I corrected with faint
asperity. "It's her own library! She brings the books herself to
the office.

"And just what part," drawled my Husband, "is this New Zealand
paragon, Miss Stoltor, to play in our Rainy Week?"

"Woltor," I corrected quite definitely. "Ann Woltor."

"Wardrobe mistress?" teased my Husband. "Or----?"

"She is going to play the part of the Someone With a Past," I said.

"What?" cried my Husband. His face was frankly shocked. "_What_?"
he repeated blankly. "The most delicate part of the cast? The most
difficult? The most hazardous? It seemed best to you, without
consultation, without argument, to act so suddenly in the matter,
and so--so all alone?"

"I had to act very suddenly," I admitted. "If I hadn't spoken just
exactly the minute I did she would have been off to Alaska within
another forty-eight hours."

"U-m-m," mused my Husband, and resumed his reading. But the half-inch
of eye brow that puckered above the edge of his newspaper loomed
definitely as the sample of a face that was still distinctly
shocked.

When he spoke again I was quite ready for his question.

"How do you know that this Ann Woltor has got a past?" he demanded.

"How do we know young Kennilworth's got a future?" I counter-checked.

"Because he makes so much noise about it I suppose," admitted my
Husband.

"By which very same method," I grinned, "I deduct the fact that Ann
Woltor has got a past,--inasmuch as she doesn't make the very
slightest sound whatsoever concerning it."

"You concede no personal reticence in the world?" quizzed my Husband.

"Yes, quite a good deal," I admitted. "But most of it I honestly
believe is due to sore throat. A normal throat keeps itself pretty
much lubricated I've noticed by talking about itself."

"Herself," corrected my Husband.

"Himself," I compromised.

"But this Ann Woltor has told you that she came from New Zealand,"
scored my Husband.

"Oh, no, she hasn't!" I contradicted. "It was the hair-dresser who
suggested New Zealand. All Ann Woltor has ever told me was that she
was going to Alaska! Anybody's willing to tell you where he's
going! But the person who never tells you where he's been--! The
person who never by word, deed or act correlates to-day with
yesterday! The Here with the There--! I've been home with her twice
to her room! I've watched her unpack the Alaska trunk! Not a thing
in it older than this winter! Not a shoe nor a hat nor a glove that
confides anything! No scent of fir-balsam left over from a summer
vacation! No photograph of sister or brother! Yet it's rather an
interesting little room, too,--awfully small and shabby after the
somewhat plushy splendor of the hairdressing job--but three or four
really erudite English Reviews on the table, a sprig of blue
larkspur thrust rather negligently into a water glass, and a man's----"

"Blue larkspur in January?" demanded my Husband. "How--how old is
this--this Woltor person?"

"Oh--twenty-five, perhaps," I shrugged.

With a gesture of impatience my Husband threw down his paper and
began to poke the fire.

"Oh, Pshaw!" he said, "is our whole dramatic endeavor going to be
wrecked by the monotony of everybody being 'twenty-five'?"

"Well--call it 'thirty-five' if you'd rather," I conceded. "Or a
hundred and five! Arm Woltor wouldn't care! That's the remarkable
thing about her face," I hastened with some fervor to explain.
"There's no dating on it! This calamity that has happened to
her,--whatever it is, has wrung her face perfectly dry of all
contributive biography except the mere structural fact of at
least reasonably conservative birth and breeding."

A little bit abruptly my Husband dropped the fire-tongs.

"You like this Ann Woltor, don't you?" he said.

"I like her tremendously," I acknowledged.

"Tremendously _as_ a person and tremendously _for_ the part!" I
insisted.

"Yet there's something about it that worries you?" quizzed my
Husband not unamiably.

"There is," I said, "just one thing. She's got a broken tooth."

With a gesture of real irritation my Husband sank down in his chair
again and snatched up the paper.

It was ten minutes before he spoke again.

"Is it a front tooth?" he questioned with out lifting his eyes from
the page.

"It is," I said.

When my Husband jumped up from his chair this time he showed no
sign at all of ever intending to return to it. As he reached for
his hat and coat and started for the door, he tried very hard to
grin. But the effort was poor. This was no mere marital
disagreement, but a real professional shock.

"I simply can't stand it," he grinned. "One's prepared, of course,
for a tragedy queen to sport a broken heart but when it comes to a
broken tooth--!"

"Wait till you see her!" I said. There was nothing else to say.
"Wait till you see her!"

Even with the door closed behind him he came back once more to tell
me how he felt.

"Oh!" he shivered. "O--H!"

Truly if we hadn't gone out together the very next day and found
George Keets I don't know what would have happened. Depression
still hung very heavily over my Husband's heart.

"Here it is almost February," he brooded, "and even with what we've
got, we're still short the Celibate and the Singing Voice and the
May Girl."

It was just then that we turned the street corner and met George
Keets.

"Why--why the Celibate--of all persons!" we both gasped as in a
single breath, and rushed upon him.

Now it may seem a little strange instead of this that we have never
thought to feature poor Rollins as the Celibate. To "double" him as
it were as Celibate and Bore. Conserving thereby one by no means
inexpensive outfit of water-proof clothes, twenty-one meals, a week's
wash, and Heaven knows how many rounds of Scotch at a time of
imminent drought. But Rollins--though as far as anybody knows, a
bachelor and eminently chaste--is by no means my idea of a
Celibate. Oh, not Rollins! Not anybody with a mind like Rollins!
For Rollins, poor dear, would marry every day in the week if
anybody would have him. It's the "other people" who have kept
Rollins virgin. But George Keets on the other hand is a good deal
of a "fascinator" in spite of his austerity, perhaps indeed because
of his austerity, tall, lean, good-looking, extravagantly severe,
thirty-eight years old, and a classmate of my Husband at college.
Whether Life would ever succeed or not in breaking down his
unaccountable intention never-to-mate, that intention,--physical,
mental, moral, psychic, call it whatever you choose,--was stamped
indelibly and for all time on the curiously incongruous granite-like
finish of his originally delicate features. Life had at least done
interesting historical things to George Keets's face.

"Oh, George!" cried my Husband, "I thought you were in Egypt
digging mummies."

"I was," admitted George without any further palaver of greeting.

"When did you get back?" cried my Husband, "And what are you doing
now!"

"And where are you going to be in May?" I interposed with perfectly
uncontrollable interest.

"Why, I'm just off the boat, you know," brightened George. "A drink
would be good, of course. But first I'd just like to run into the
library for a minute to see if they've put in any new thrillers
while I've been gone. There's a corking new book on Archselurus
that ought to be due about now."

"On w-what?" I stammered.

"Oh, fossil cats, you know, and all that sort of thing," explained
George chivalrously. "But, of course--you, Mrs. Delville," he
hastened now to appease me, "would heaps rather hear about Paris
fashions, I know. So if you-people really should want me in May
I'll try my best, I promise you, to remember every latest wrinkle
of lace, or feather. Only, of course," he explained with typical
conscientiousness, "in the museums and the libraries one doesn't
see just--of course--the----"

"On the contrary, Mr. Keats," I interrupted hectically, "there is
no subject in the world that interests me more--at the moment--than
Mummies. And by the second week in May that interest will have
assumed proportions that----"

"S-sh!" admonished my Husband. "But really, George," he himself
hastened to cut in, "if you could come to us the second week in
May----"

"May?" considered George. "Second week? Why, certainly I will." And
bolted for the library, while my Husband and I in a perfectly
irresistible impulse drew aside on the curbing to watch him
disappear.

Equally unexplainably three totally non-concerned women turned also
to watch him.

"It's his shoulders," I ventured. "The amazing virility of his
shoulders contrasted with the stinginess of his smile."

"Stinginess nothing!" snapped my Husband. "Devil take him!"

"He may--yet," I mused as we swung into step again.

So now we had nothing to worry about--or rather no uncertainty to
worry about except the May Girl and the Singing Voice.

"The Singing Voice," my Husband argued, "might be picked up by good
fortune at most any cabaret show or choral practise. Not any
singing voice would do, of course. It must be distinctly poignant.
But even poignancy may be found sometimes where you least expect
it,--some reasonably mature, faintly disappointed sort of voice,
usually, lilting with unquestionable loveliness, just this side of
real professional success.

"But where in the world should we find a really ingenuous Ingénue?"

"They don't exist any more!" I asserted. "Gone out of style like
the Teddy Bear--! Old Ingénues you see, of course, sometimes, sweet
and precious and limp--as old Teddy Bears. But a brand new Ingénue--?
Don't you remember the awful search we had last year and even
then----?"

"Maybe you're right," worried my Husband.

And then the horrid attack of neuralgia descended on poor Mr.
Husband so suddenly, so acutely, that we didn't worry at all about
anything else for days! And even when that worry was over, instead
of starting off gaily together for the Carolinas as we had
intended, to search through steam-heated corridors, and green
velvet golfways, and jessamine scented lanes, for the May Girl, my
poor Husband had to dally at home instead, in a very cold, slushy
and disagreeable city, to be X-rayed, tooth-pulled, ear-stabbed,
and every thing but Bertilloned, while I, for certain business
reason, went on ahead to meet the Spring.

But even at parting it was the dramatic anxiety that worried my
Husband most.

"Now, don't you dare do a thing this time," he warned me, "until I
come! Look around all you want to! Get acquainted! Size things up!
But if ever two people needed to work together in a matter it's in
this question of choosing a May Girl!"

Whereupon in an impulse quite as amazing to himself as to me--he
went ahead and chose the May Girl all by himself!

Before I had been in the Carolinas three days the telegram came.

"Have found May Girl. Success beyond wildest dreams. Doubles with
Singing Voice. Absolute miracle. Explanations."

Himself and the explanations arrived a week later. Himself, poor
dear, was rather depleted. But the explanations were full enough to
have pleased anybody.

He had been waiting, it seems, on the day of the discovery, an
interminably long time in the doctor's office. All around him, in
the dinginess and general irritability of such an occasion, loomed
the bulky shapes of other patients who like himself had also been
waiting interminable eons of time. Everybody was very cross. And it
was snowing outside,--one of those dirty gray late-winter snows
that don't seem really necessary.

And when _She_ came! Just a girl's laugh at first from the street
door! An impish prance of feet down the dark, unaccustomed hallway! A
little trip on the threshold! And then personified--laughing--blushing,
stumbling fairly headlong at last into the room--the most radiantly
lovely young girl that you have ever had the grace to imagine,
dangling exultantly from each frost-pinked hand a very large, wriggly,
and exceedingly astonished rabbit.

"Oh, Uncle Charles!" she began, "s-ee what I've found! And in an
ash-barrel, too! In--a--" She blinked the snow from her lashes,
took a sudden startled glance round the room, another at the clock,
and collapsed with confusion into the first chair that she could
reach.

A very tall "little girl" she was, and very young, not a day
more than eighteen surely. And even in the encompassing bulk
of her big coon-skin coat with its broad arms hugging the brown
rabbits to her breast she gave an impression of extraordinary
slimness and delicacy, an impression accentuated perhaps by a
slender silk-stockinged ankle, the frilly cuff of a white sleeve,
and the aura of pale gold hair that radiated in every direction
from the brim of her coon-skin hat. For fully fifteen minutes my
Husband said she sat huddled-up in all the sweet furry confusion of
a young animal, till driven apparently by that very confusion to
essay some distinctly normal-appearing, every-day gesture, she
reached out impulsively to the reading table and picked up a book
which some young man had just relinquished rather suddenly at a
summons to the doctor's inner office. Relaxing ever so slightly
into the depths of her chair with the bunnies' noses twinkling
contentedly to the rhythm of her own breathing, she made a
wonderful picture, line, color, spirit, everything of _Youth_.
Reading, with that strange, extra, inexplainable touch of the
sudden little pucker in the eyebrows, sheer intellectual perplexity
was in that pucker!

But when the young man returned from the inner office he did not
leave at once as every cross, irritable person in the room hoped
that he would, but fidgeted around instead with hat and coat,
stamped up and down crowding other people's feet, and elbowing
other people's elbows. With a gaspy glance at his watch he turned
suddenly on the girl with the rabbits. "Excuse me," he floundered,
"but I have to catch a train--_please_ may I have my book?"

"Your book?" deprecated the Girl. Confusion anew overwhelmed her!
"Your--book? Why, I beg your pardon! Why--why--" Pink as a rose
she slammed the covers and glanced for the first time at the title.
The title of the book was "What Every Young Husband Should Know."
. . . With a sigh like the sigh of a breeze in the ferns the
tension of the room relaxed! A very fat, cross-looking woman in
black satin ripped audibly at a side seam. . . . A frail old
gentleman who really had very few laughs left, wasted one of them
in the smothering depths of his big black-bordered handkerchief.
. . . The lame newsboy on the stool by the door emitted a single
snort of joy. Then the doctor himself loomed suddenly from the
inner office, and started right through everybody to the girl with
the rabbits. "Why, May," he laughed, "I told you not to get here
till four o'clock!"

"Oh, not May?" I protested to my Husband. "It simply couldn't be!
Not _really_?"

"Yes, really," affirmed my Husband. "Isn't it the limit? But wait
till you hear the rest! She's Dr. Brawne's ward, it seems, and has
been visiting him for the winter. . . . Comes from some little
place way off somewheres. . . . And she's got one of those sweet,
clear, absolutely harrowing 'boy soprano' types of voices that
sound like incense and altar lights even in rag-time. But weirder
than any thing--" triumphed my Husband.

"Oh, not than 'anything'?" I gasped.

"But weirder than anything," persisted my Husband, "is the curious
way she's marked."

"M-marked?" I stammered.

"Yes. After I saw her with her hat off," said my Husband, "I saw
the 'mark'. I've seen it in boys before, but never in a girl--an
absolutely isolated streak of gray hair! In all that riot of
blondness and sparkle and youth, just as riotous, just as lovely, a
streak of gray hair! It's bewitching! Bewildering! Like May itself!
Now sunshine! Now cloud! You'll write to her immediately, won't
you?" he begged. "And to Dr. Brawne, too? I told Dr. Brawne quite
frankly that it was going to be rather an experimental party, but
that, of course, we'd take the best possible care of her. And he
said he'd never seen an occasion yet when she wasn't perfectly
capable of taking care of herself. And that he'd be delighted to
have her come--" laughed my Husband quite suddenly, "if we were
sure that we didn't mind animals."

"Animals?" I questioned.

"Yes, dogs, cats, birds!" explained my Husband. "It isn't apt to be
a large animal such as a horse or a cow, Dr. Brawne was kind enough
to assure me. But he never knew her yet, he said, to arrive
anywhere without a guinea pig, squirrel, broken-winged bat, lame
dove, or half-choked mouse that she had acquired on the way! She's
very tender-hearted. And younger than----"

Blankly for a moment my Husband and I sat staring into each other's
eyes. Then, quite impulsively, I reached over and kissed him.

"Oh, Jack," I admitted, "it's too perfect! Truly it makes me feel
nervous!--Suppose she should roll her hoop off the cliff or----"

"Or--blow out the gas!" chuckled my Husband.

So you see now our cast was all assembled.

Radiant, "runctious," impatient Paul Brenswick and Victoria Meredith
for the Bride and Groom.

George Keets for the Very Celibate Person.

Ann Woltor for the Someone With a Past.

Claude Kennilworth for the Someone With a Future.

May Davies for the May Girl and the Singing Voice.

And Rollins for the Bore. About Rollins I must now confess that
I have not been perfectly frank. We hire Rollins! How else could
we control him! Even with a mushroom mind like his,--fruiting only
in bad weather, one can't force him on one's guests morning, noon,
_and_ night! Very fortunately here, for such strategy as is necessary,
my Husband concedes one further weakness than what I have previously
designated as his passion for amateur theatricals and his tolerance
of me. That weakness is sea shells--mollusca, you know, and that
sort of thing. . . . From all over the world, smelling saltily of
coral and palms, iceberg or arctic,--and only too often alas of
their dead selves, these smooth-spikey-pink-blue-yellow-or-mottled
shells arrive with maddening frequency. And Rollins is a born
cataloguer! What easier thing in the world to say than, "Oh, by
the way, Rollins, old man, here's an invoice that might interest
you from a Florida Key that I've just located. . . . How about
the second week in May? Could you come then, do you think? I'm
all tied up to be sure with a houseful of guests that week, but
they won't bother you any. And, at least, you'll have your evenings
for fun. Clothes? Haven't got 'em? Oh, Pshaw! Let me see. It rained
last year, didn't it? . . . Well, I guess we can raise the same
umbrella that we raised for you then! S'long!"

Everything settled then! Everything ready but the springtime and
the scenery! . . . And God Himself at work on that!--Hist! What is
it? The flash of a blue-bird?

A bell tinkles! A pulley-rope creaks! And the Curtain Rises!

May always comes so amazingly soon after February! So infinitely
much sooner than anyone dares hope that it would! Peering into
snow-smeared shop windows some rather particularly bleak morning
you notice with a half-contemptuous sort of amusement a precocious
display of ginghams and straw hats. And before you can turn round
to tell anybody about it, tulips have happened!--And It's May!

More than seeming extravagantly early this year, May dawned also
with extravagant lavishness. Through every prismatic color of the
world, sunshine sang to the senses!

"What shall we do," fretted my Husband, "if this perfection lasts?"
The question indeed was a leading one!

The scenery for Rainy Week did not arrive until the afternoon of
the eighth.

From his frowning survey of bright lawns, gleaming surf, radiant
sky, I saw my Husband turn suddenly with a little gasping sigh that
might have meant anything.

"What is it?" I cried.

"Look!" he said, "it's come."

Silently, shoulder to shoulder, we stood and watched the gigantic
storm-bales roll into the sky--packed in fleece, corded with ropes
of mist, gorgeous, portentous,--To-morrow's Rain! It is not many
hosts and hostesses under like circumstances who turn to each other
as we did with a single whoop of joy!

An hour later, hatless and coatless in the lovely warm May
twilight, we stood by the larch tree waiting for our guests. We
like to have them sup in town at their own discretion or
indiscretion, that first night, and all arrive together reasonably
sleek and sleepy, and totally unacquainted, on the eight o'clock
train. But the larch tree has always been our established point for
meeting the _Rainy Week_ people. Conceding cordially the truth of
the American aphorism that while charity may perfectly legitimately
begin at home, hospitality should begin at the railroad station! We
personally have proved beyond all doubt that for our immediate
interests at stake dramatic effect begins at the entrance to our
driveway.

Yet it is always with mingled feelings of trepidation and
anticipation that we first sense the blurry rumble of motor wheels
on the highway. If the station bus were only blue or green! But
palest oak! And shuttered like a roll-top desk! Spilling out
strange personalities at you like other people's ideas brimming
from pigeon-holes!

For some unfathomable reason of constraint this night, no one was
talking when the bus arrived. Shy, stiff-spined, non-communicative,
still questioning, perhaps. Who was who and what was what, these
seven guests who by the return ride a week hence might even be
mated, such things have happened, or once more not speaking to each
other, this also has happened, loomed now like so many dummies in
the gloom.

"Why, Hello!" we cried, jumping to the rear step of the bus as it
slowed slightly at the curb, and thrusting our faces as genially as
possible into the dark, unresponsive doorway.

"Hello!" rallied someone--I think it was Rollins. Whoever it was he
seemed to be having a terrible time trying to jerk his suitcase
across other people's feet.

"Oh, is this where you live?" questioned George Keets's careful
voice from the shadows. The faintest possible tinge of relief
seemed to be in the question.

"Here?" brightened somebody else.

A window-fastener clicked, a shutter crashed, an aperture opened,
and everybody all at once, scenting the sea, crowded to stare out
where the gray dusk merging into gray rocks merged in turn with the
gray rocks into a low rambling gray fieldstone house silhouetted
with indescribable weirdness at the moment against that delicate,
pale gold, French-drawing-room sort of sky cluttered so
incongruously with the clump of dark clouds.

"The road--doesn't go any farther?" puzzled someone. "There's no
other stopping place you mean--just a little bit farther along?
This is the end,--the last house,--the----?"

High from a cliff-top somewhere a sea bird lifted a single eerie cry.

"Oh, how--how dramatic!" gasped somebody.

Reaching out to nudge my Husband's hand I collided instead with a
dog's cold nose.

Following apparently the same impulse my Husband's hand met the
dog's startling nose at almost the same instant.

Except for a second's loss of balance on the bus-step neither of us
resented the incident. But it was my Husband who recovered his
conversation as well as his balance first.

"Oh, you Miss Davies!" he called blithely into the bus. "What's
your Pom's name? Nose-Gay? Skip-a-bout? Cross-Patch? What?--Lucky
for you we knew your propensity for arriving with pets! The
kennel's all ready and the cat sent away!"

In the nearest shadow of all it was almost as though one heard an
_ego_ bristle.

"I beg your pardon, but the Pomeranian is mine," affirmed Claude
Kennilworth's un-mistakable voice with what seemed like quite
unnecessary hauteur.

"What the deuce is the matter with everybody?" whispered my
Husband.

With a jerk and a bump the bus grazed a big boulder and landed us
wheezily at our own front door.

As expeditiously as possible my Husband snatched up the lantern
that gleamed from the doorstep and brandishing it on high,
challenged the shadowy occupants of the bus to disembark and
proclaim themselves.

Ann Woltor stepped down first. As vague as the shadows she merged
from her black-garbed figure faded un-outlined into the shadow of
the porch. For an instant only the uplifted lantern flashed across
her strange stark face--and then went crashing down into a shiver
of glass on the gravelly path at my Husband's feet. "Ann--Stoltor!"
I heard him gasp. My Husband is not usually a fumbler either with
hand or tongue. In the brightening flare of the flash-light that
some one thrust into his hands his face showed frankly rattled.
"Ann _Woltor_!" I prompted him hastily. For the infinitesimal
fraction of a second our eyes met. I hope my smile was as quick.
"What is the matter with everybody?" I said.

With extravagant exuberance my Husband jumped to help the rest of
our guests alight. "Hi, there, Everybody!" he greeted each new face
in turn as it emerged somewhat hump-shouldered and vague through
the door of the bus into the flare of his lantern light.

Poor Rollins, of course, tumbled out.

Fastidiously, George Keets illustrated how a perfect exit from a
bus should be made,--suitcase, hat-box, English ulster, everything
a model of its kind. Even the constraint of his face, absolutely
perfect.

With the Pomeranian clutched rather drastically under one arm,
Claude Kennilworth followed Keets. All the time, of course, you
knew that it was the Pomeranian who was growling, but from the
frowning irritability of young Kennilworth's eyes one might almost
have concluded that the boy was a ventriloquist and the Pom a
puppet instead of a puppy. "Her name is 'Pet'," he announced
somewhat succinctly to my Husband. "And she sleeps in no--kennel!"

A trifle paler than I had expected, but inexpressively young,
lovely, palpitant, and altogether adorable, the May Girl sprang
into my vision--and my arms. Her heart was beating like a wild
bird's.

With the incredibility of their miracle still stamped almost
embarrassingly on their faces, our Bride-and-Groom-of-a-Week
completed the list. It wasn't just the material physical fact that
Love was consummated, that gave them that look. But the spiritual
amazement that Love was consummatable! No other "look" in life ever
compasses it, ever duplicates it!

It made my Husband quite perceptibly quicken the tempo of his
jocosity.

"One--two--three--four--five--six--seven," he enumerated. "All good
guests come straight from Heaven! One--two--three--four--five--six--
Seven--" he repeated as though to be perfectly sure, "_seven_?
Why--Why, what the----?" he interrupted himself suddenly.

With frank bewilderment I saw him jump back to the rear step of the
bus and flash his light into the farthest corner where the huddled
form of an _eighth_ person loomed weirdly from the shadows.

It was a man--a young man. And at first glimpse he was quite dead.
But on second glimpse, merely drunk. Hopelessly,--helplessly,--sodden
drunk, with his hat gone, his collar torn away, his haggard face
sagging like some broken thing against his breast.

With a tension suddenly relaxed, a faint sigh seemed to slip from
the group outside. In the crowding faces that surrounded us
instantly, it must have been something in young Kennilworth's
expression, or in the Pomeranian's, that made my Husband speak just
exactly as he did. With his arms held under the disheveled, uncouth
figure, he turned quite abruptly and scanned the faces of his
guests, "And whose little pet--may this be?" he asked trenchantly.

From the shadow of the Porte-cochere somebody laughed. It was
rather a vacuous little laugh. Sheer nerves! Rollins, I think.

Framed in the half-shuttered window of the bus the May Girl's face
pinked suddenly like a flare of apple blossoms.

"He--came with--me," said the May Girl.

No matter how informally one chooses to run his household there is
almost always some one rule I've noticed on which the smoothness of
that informality depends.

In our household that rule seems to be that no explanations shall
ever be asked either in the darkness or by artificial light. . . .
It being the supposition I infer that most things explain
themselves by daylight. . . . Perfectly cordially I concede that
they usually do. . . . But some nights are a great deal longer to
wait through than others.

It wasn't, on this particular night, that anyone refused to
explain. But that nobody even had time to think of explaining. The
young Stranger was in a bad way. Not delirium tremens nor anything
like that, but a fearful alcoholic disorganization of some sort.
The men were running up and down stairs half the night. Their
voices rang through the halls in short, sharp orders to each other.
No one else spoke above a whisper. With silly comforts like talcum
powder, and hot water bottles, and sweet chocolate, and new novels,
I put the women to bed. Their comments if not explanatory were at
least reasonably characteristic.

From a swirl of pink chiffon and my best blankets, with her ear
cocked quite frankly toward a step on the stairs, her eyes like
stars, her mouth all a-kiss, the Bride reported her own emotions in
the matter.

"No,--no one, of course had ever believed for a moment," the Bride
assured me, "that the Drunken Man was one of the guests. . . . And
yet, when he didn't get off at any of the stops, and this house was
so definitely announced as the 'end of the road'--why it did, of
course, make one feel just a little bit nervous," flushed the
Bride, perfectly irrelevantly, as the creak on the stairs drew
nearer.

Ann Woltor registered only a very typical indifference.

"A great many different kinds of things," she affirmed, "were bound
to happen in any time as long as a day. . . . One simply had to get
used to them, that was all." She was unpacking her sombre black
traveling bag as she spoke, and the first thing she took out from
it was a man's gay, green-plaided golf cap. It looked strange with
the rest of her things. All the rest of her things were black.

I thought I would never succeed in putting the May Girl to bed.
With a sweet sort of stubbornness she resisted every effort. The
first time I went back she was kneeling at her bedside to say her
"forgotten prayers." The second time I went back she had just
jumped up to "write a letter to her Grandfather." "Something about
the sea," she affirmed, "had made her think of her grandfather."
"It was a long time," she acknowledged, since she "had thought of
her grandfather." "He was very old," she argued, "and she didn't
want to delay any longer about writing." Slim and frank as a boy in
her half-adjusted blanket-wrapper dishabille she smiled up at me
through the amazing mop of gold hair with the gray streak floating
like a cloud across the sunshine of her face. She was very nervous.
She must have been nervous. It darkened her eyes to two blue
sapphires. It quickened her breath like the breath of a young fawn
running. "And would I please tell her--how to spell 'oceanic'?" she
implored me. As though answering intuitively the unspoken question
on my lips, she shrugged blame from her as some exotic songbird
might have shrugged its first snow. "No--she didn't know who the
young man was! Truly--as far as she knew--she had never--never seen
the young man before!--o-c-e-a-n-i-c--was it?----"

The rain was not actually delivered until one o'clock in the
morning. Just before dawn I heard the storm-bales rip. In sheets of
silver and points of steel, with rage and roar, and a surf like a
picture in a Sunday supplement, the weather broke loose!

Thank heaven the morning was so dark that no one appeared in the
breakfast-room an instant before the appointed hour of nine.

George Keets, of course, appeared exactly at nine, very trim, very
_distingué_, in a marvelously tailored gray flannel suit, and
absolutely possessed to make his own coffee.

Claude Kennilworth's morning manner was very frankly peevish.
"His room had a tin roof and he hardly thought he should be
able to stand it. . . . Rain? Did you call this rain? It was a
_Flood_! . . . Were there any Movie Palaces near? . . . And were
they open mornings? . . . And he'd like an underdone chop, please,
for the Pomeranian. . . . And it wasn't his dog anyway, darn the
little fool, but belonged to the girl who had the studio next to
his and she was possessed with the idea that a week at the shore
would put the pup on its feet again. . . . Women were so blamed
temperamental. . . . If there was one thing in the world that he
hated it was temperamental people." And all the time he was talking
he wasn't making anything with his hands, because he wasn't
thinking anything instead, "And how in Creation," he scolded, "did
we ever happen to build a house out on the granite edge of Nowhere?
. . . How did we stand it? How----? . . . Hi there! . . . Wait a
moment! . . . _God_--what _Form_! That wave with the tortured top!
. . . Hush! . . . Don't speak! . . . _Please_ leave him alone!
Breakfast? Not yet! When a fellow could watch a--a thing like that!
. . . For heaven's sake, pass him that frothy-edged napkin! . . .
Did anybody mind if he _tore_ it? . . . While he watched that other
froth tear!"

Dear, honest, ardent, red-blooded Paul Brenswick came down so
frankly interested in the special device by which our house gutters
took care of such amazing torrents of water that everybody felt
perfectly confident all at once that no bride of his would ever
suffer from leaky roofs or any other mechanical defect. Paul
Brenswick liked the rain just as much as he liked the gutters! And
he liked the sea! And he liked the house! And he liked the sky! And
he liked everything! Even when a clumsy waitress joggled coffee
into his grapefruit he seemed to like that just as much as he liked
everything else. Paul Brenswick was a real Bridegroom. I am not, I
believe, a particularly envious person, and have never as far as I
know begrudged another woman her youth or her beauty or her talent
or her wealth. But if it ever came to a chance of swapping facial
expressions, just once in my life, some very rainy morning, I wish
I could look like a Bridegroom!

But the expression on the Bride's face was distinctly worried. Joy
worried! Any woman who had ever been a bride could have read the
expression like an open book. Victoria Brenswick had not counted on
rain. Moonlight, of course, was what she had counted on! Moonlight,
day and night in all probability! And long, sweet, soft stretches
of beach! And cavernous rocks! And incessantly mirthful escapades
of escape from the crowd! But to be shut up all day long in a
houseful of strange people! . . . With a Bridegroom who after all
was still more or less of a strange Bridegroom? The panic in her
face was almost ghastly! The panic of the Perfectly-Happy! The
panic of the person hanging over-ecstatically on the absolute
perfection of a singer's prolonged high note, driven all at once to
wonder if this is the moment when the note must break! . . . To be
all alone and bored on a rainy day is no more than anyone would
expect. . . . But to be with one's Lover and have the day prove
dull? . . . If God in the terrible uncertainty of Him should force
even one dull day into the miracle of their life together----?

Ann Woltor, dragging down to breakfast just a few moments late, had
not noticed especially, it seemed, that the day was rainy. She met
my Husband's eyes as she met the eyes of her fellow-guests, calmly,
indifferently, and with perfect sophistication. If his presence or
personality was in any way a shock to her she certainly gave no
sign of it.

The May Girl didn't appear till very late, so late indeed that
everybody started to tease her for being such a Sleepy Head. Her
face was very flushed. Her hair in a riot of gold--and gray. Her
appetite like the appetite of a young cannibal. Across the rim of
her cocoa cup she hurled a lovely defiance at her traducers.
"Sleepy Head!" she exulted. "Not much! Hadn't she been up since
six? And out on the beach? And all over the rocks? . . . Way, way
out to the farthest point? . . . There was such a heavenly suit of
yellow oil-skins in her closet! . . . She hoped it wasn't cheeky of
her but she just couldn't resist 'em! . . . And the fishes? . . .
The poor, poor little bruised fishes dashed up, by that terrible
surf on the rocks! . . . . She thought she never, never would get
them all put back! . . . They kept coming and coming so! Every new
wave! Flopping!--Flopping----"

Rollins's breakfast had been sent to his room. You yourself
wouldn't have wanted to spring Rollins on any one quite so early in
the day. And with my best breakfast tray, my second best china, and
sherry in the grape fruit, there was no reason certainly why
Rollins in any way should feel discriminated against. Surely, as
far as Rollins knew, every guest was breakfasting in bed.

Even without Rollins there was quite enough uncertainty in the air.

Everybody was talking--talking about the morning, I mean--not about
yesterday morning; most certainly not about yesterday night!
Babble, chatter, drawl, laughter, the voices rose and fell.
Breakfast indeed was just about over when a faint stir on the
threshold made everybody look up.

It was the Drunken Stranger of the night before.

Heaven knows he was sober enough now. But very shaky! Yet
collarless as he was and still unshaven--our men had evidently not
expected quite so early a resuscitation--he loomed up now in the
doorway with a certain tragic poise and dignity that was by no
means unattractive.

"Why, hello!" said everybody.

"Hello!" said the Stranger. With a palpable flex of muscle he
leaned back against the wainscoting of the door and narrowed his
haggard eyes to the cheerful scene before him. "I don't know where
I am," he said, "or how I got here. . . . Or who you are." "I can't
seem to remember anything." The faintly sheepish smile that
quickened suddenly in his eyes, if not distinctly humorous, was at
least plucky. "I think I must have had a drink," he said.

"I wouldn't wonder!" grinned Paul Brenswick.

"You are perfectly right," conceded George Keets.

"Have another!" suggested my Husband. "A straight and narrow this
time! You look wobbly. There's nothing like coffee."

And still the Stranger stood undecided in the doorway. "I'm not
very fit," he acknowledged. "Not with ladies. . . . But I _had_ to
know where I was." Blinking with perplexity he stared and stared at
the faces before him. "I'm three thousand miles from home," he
worried. "I don't know a soul this side of the Sierras. . . . I--I
don't know how it happened----"

"Oh, Shucks!" shrugged young Kennilworth. "Easiest thing in the
world to happen to a stranger in a new town! 'Welcome to our City
Welcome to our City' from night till morning and morning till night
again! Any crowd once it gets started----"

"Crowd!" brightened the Stranger. "I--I was in some sort of a--a
crowd?" he rummaged hopefully through his poor bruised brain.

From her concentrated interest in a fried chicken-bone, the May
Girl glanced up with her first evidence of divided attention.

"Yes! You were!" she confided genially. "It was at the railroad
junction. And when the officer arrived, he said, 'I hate like the
dickens to run this gentleman in, but if there's nobody to look
after him--?' So I said you belonged to me! I saw the crape on your
sleeve!" said the May Girl.

"Crape--on--my--sleeve?" stammered the Stranger. With a dreadful
gesture of incredulity he lifted his black-banded arm into vision.
It was like watching a live heart torn apart to see his memory
waken. "My--God!" he gasped. "My _God_!" Still wavering but with a
really heroic effort to square his stricken shoulders, he swung
back toward the company. His face was livid, his voice, barely
articulate. Over face and voice lay still that dreadful blight of
astonishment. But when he spoke his statement was starkly simple.
"I--I buried my wife and unborn child--yesterday," he said. "In a
strange land--among strangers I--I----"

More quickly than I could possibly have imagined it, George Keets
was on his feet beckoning the Stranger to the place which he
himself had just vacated. And with his hands on the Stranger's
shoulders he bent down suddenly over him with a curiously twisted
little smile.

"Welcome to our--Pity!" said George Keets.

Between Paul Brenswick and his Bride there flashed a sharp glance
of terror. It was as though the bride's heart had gasped out. "What
if I have to die some day?--And _this_ day was wasted in rain?"

I saw young Kennilworth flush and turn away from that glance. I saw
the May Girl open her eyes with a new baffled sort of perplexity.

It was then that Rollins came puttering in, grinning like a Chessy
Cat, with his half-demolished breakfast sliding round rather
threateningly on his ill-balanced tray. The strange exultancy of
rain was in his eye.

"I thought I heard voices," he beamed. "Merry voices!" With
mounting excitement he began to beat tunes with his knife and fork
upon the delicate porcelain dome of his toast dish. "Am I a--King,"
he began to intone, "that I should call my own, this--?" Struck
suddenly by the somewhat strained expression of Ann Woltor's face,
he dropped his knife and fork and fixed his eye upon her for the
first time with an unmistakable intentness.

"How did you break your tooth?" beamed Rollins.

CHAPTER II

FOR a single horrid moment everybody's heart seemed to lurch off
into space to land only too audibly in a gaspy thud of dismay.

Then Ann Woltor with unprecedented presence of mind jumped up from
the table and ran to the mirror over the fireplace. Only the
twittering throat-muscle reflected in that mirror belied for an
instant the sincerity of either her haste or her astonishment.

"Broken tooth!" she protested incredulously. "Why! Have I got
a--broken tooth?"

People acknowledge their mental panics so divergently. My Husband
acknowledged his by ramming his elbow into his coffee cup. Claude
Kennilworth lit one cigarette after another. The May Girl started
to butter a picture post card that someone had just passed her.
Quite starkly before my very eyes I saw the Sober Stranger,
erstwhile drunken, reach out and slip a silver salt-shaker into his
pocket. Meeting his glance my own nerves exploded in a single hoot
of mirth.

Into the unhappy havoc of the Stranger's face a rather sick but
very determinate little smile shot suddenly.

"Well, I certainly am rattled?" he acknowledged.

His embarrassment was absolutely perfect. Not a whit too much, not
a whit too little, at a moment when the slightest under-emphasis or
over-emphasis of his awkwardness would have stamped him
ineradicably as either boor--or bounder. More indeed by his chair's
volition than by his own he seemed to jerk aside then and there
from any further responsibility for the incident. Turbid as the
storm at the window his eyes racked back to the eyes of his
companions.

"Surely," he besought us, "there must be some place--some
hotel--somewhere in this town where I can crawl into for a day or
two till I can yank myself together again?  . . . Taking me in this
way from the streets--or worse the way you-people have--" Along the
stricken pallor of his forehead a glisten of sweat showed faintly.
From my eyes to my Husband's eyes, and back to mine again he turned
with a sharply impulsive gesture of appeal. "How do you-people know
but what I _am_ a burglar?" he demanded.

"Even so," I suggested blithely, "can't you see that we'd
infinitely rather have you visiting here as our friend than
boarding at the hotel as our foe!"

The mirthless smile on the Stranger's face twitched ever so faintly
at one corner.

"You really believe then--" he quickened, "that there is 'honor
among thieves'?"

"All proverbs," intercepted my Husband a bit abruptly, "are best
proved by their antithesis. We do at least know that there is at
times--a considerable streak of dishonor among saints!"

"Eh?--What's that--I didn't quite catch it," beamed the Bridegroom.

But my Husband's entire attention seemed focused rather suddenly on
the Stranger.

"So you'd much better stay right on here where you are!" he adjured
him with some accent of authority. "Where all explanations are
already given and taken! . . . Ourselves quite opportunely short
one guest and long one guest-room, and--No! I won't listen for a
moment to its being called an 'imposition'!" protested my Husband.
"Not for a moment! Only, of course, I must admit," he confided
genially, above the flare of a fresh cigarette, "that it would be a
slight convenience to know your name."

"My name?" flushed the Stranger. "Why, of course! It's Allan John."

"You mean 'John Allan'," corrected the May Girl very softly.

"No," insisted the Stranger. "It's Allan John." Quite logically he
began to rummage through his pockets for the proof. "It's written
on my bill-folder," he frowned. "It's in my check-book. . . . It's
written on no-end of envelopes." With his face the color of half-dead
sedge grass he sank back suddenly into his chair and turned his
empty hands limply outward as though his wrist-bones had been
wrung. "Gone!" he gasped. "Stripped!--Everything!"

"There you have it!" I babbled hysterically. "Now, how do you know
but what _we_ are burglars? . . . This whole house a Den of
Thieves? . . . The impeccable Mr. George Keets there at your
right,--no more, no less, than exactly what he looks,--an almost
perfect replica of a stage 'Raffles'?"

"Eh? What's that?" bridled George Keets.

"Dragging you here to this house the way we did," I floundered
desperately. "Quite helpless as you were. So--so----"

"'Spifflicated,'" prompted the May Girl. The word on her lips was
like the flutter of a rose petal.

With a little gasp of astonishment young Kennilworth rose from his
place, and dragging his chair in one hand, his plate of fruit in
the other, moved round to the May Girl's elbow to finish his
breakfast. Like a palm trying to patronize a pine tree, his crisp
exotic young ego swept down across her young serenity.

"Really, I don't quite make you out," he said. "I think I shall
have to study you!"

"Study--me!" reflected the May Girl. "Make a lesson about me, you
mean! On a holiday?" The vaguely dawning dimple in her smooth cheek
faded suddenly out again.

The Stranger--Allan John--it seemed, was rising from the table.

"If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go to my room," he explained.
"I'm still pretty shaky. I'm----"

But half way to the stairs, as though drawn by some irresistible
impulse, he turned, and fumbling his way back across the dining-room
opened the big glass doors direct into the storm. Tripping ever so
slightly on the threshold he lurched forward in a single wavering
step. In an instant the May Girl was at his side, her steadying
hand held out to his! Recovering his balance almost instantly he
did not however release her hand, but still holding tight to it,
indescribably puzzled, indescribably helpless, stood shoulder to
shoulder with her, staring out into the tempestuous scene. Lashed
by the wind the May Girl's mop of hair blew gold, blew gray, across
his rain-drenched eyes. Blurred in a gusty flutter of white skirts
his whole tragic, sagging figure loomed suddenly like some weird,
symbolic shadow against the girl's bright beauty.

Frankly the picture startled me! "S-s-h!" warned my Husband. "It
won't hurt her any! He doesn't even know whether she's young or
old."

"Or a boy--or a girl," interposed George Keets, a bit drily.

"Or an imp or a saint," grinned young Kennilworth. "Or----"

"Or anything at all," persisted my Husband, "except that she says
'_Kindness_' and nothing else, you notice, except just
'_Kindness_.' No suggestions, you observe? No advice? And at an
acid moment in his life of such unprecedented shock and general
nervous disorganization when his only conceivable chance of 'come-back'
perhaps, hangs on the alkaline wag of a strange dog's tail or the
tune of a street piano proving balm not blister. By to-morrow--I
think--you won't see him holding hands with the May Girl nor with
any other woman. Personally," confided my Husband a bit abruptly,
"I rather like the fellow! Even in the worst of his plight last
night there was a certain fundamental sort of poise and dignity
about him as of one who would say, 'Bad as this is, you chaps must
see that I'd stand ready with my life to do the same for you'!"

"To--do--the same--for you?" gasped the Bride. Very quietly, like
an offended young princess, she rose from the table and stood for
that single protesting moment with her hand on her Bridegroom's
shoulder. Her eager, academic young face was frankly aghast,--her
voice distinctly strained. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I quite fail
to see how the word 'dignity' could possibly be applied to any man
who had so debased himself as to go and get drunk because his wife
and child were dead!"

"You talk," said my Husband, "as though you thought 'getting drunk'
was some sort of jocular sport. It isn't! That is, not inevitably,
you know!"

"No--I didn't--know," murmured the Bride coldly.

"Deplorable as the result proved to be," interposed George Keets's
smooth, carefully modulated voice, "it's hardly probable I suppose
that the poor devil started out with the one deliberate purpose
of--of debasing him self, as Mrs. Brenswick calls it."

"N-o?" questioned the Bride.

"It isn't exactly, you mean, as though he'd leapt from the church
shouting, 'Yo--ho--, and a bottle of rum,'" observed young
Kennilworth with one faintly-twisted eyebrow.

"S-s-h!" admonished everybody.

"Maybe he simply hadn't eaten for days," suggested my Husband.

"Or slept for nights and nights," frowned George Keets.

"And just absolutely was obliged to have a bracer," said my
Husband, "to put the bones back into his knees again so that he
could climb up the steps of his train and fumble some sort of way
to his seat without seeming too conspicuous. Whatever religion may
do, you know, to starch a man's soul or stiffen his upper lip, he's
got to have bones in his knees if he's going to climb up into
railroad trains. . . . And our poor young friend here, it would
seem, merely mis----"

"Mis--calculated," mused Kennilworth, "how many knees he had."

"Paul wouldn't do it!" flared the Bride.

"Do what?" demanded young Kennilworth.

"Hush!" protested everybody.

"Make a beast of himself--if I died--if I died!" persisted the Bride.

"Pray excuse me for contradicting either your noun or your
preposition," apologized my Husband. "But even at its worst I'm
quite willing to wager that the only thing in the world poor Allan
John started out to 'make' was an oblivion--for--himself."

"An oblivion?" scoffed the Bride.

"Yes--even for one night!" persisted my Husband. "Even for one
short little night! . . . Before the horror of 365 nights to the
year and God knows how many years to the life--rang on again! Some
men really like their wives you know,--some men--so no matter how
thin-skinned and weak this desire for oblivion seems to you--"
quickened my Husband, "it is at least a----"

"Paul wouldn't!" frowned the Bride.

In the sudden accentuation of strain everybody turned as quickly as
possible to poor Paul to decide as cheerfully as seemed compatible
with good taste just what that gorgeously wholesome looking
specimen of young manhood would or would not do probably under
suggested circumstances. Nobody certainly wanted to consider the
matter seriously, yet nobody with the Bride's scared eyes still
scorching through his senses would have felt quite justified I
think in mere shrugging the issue aside.

"No, I don't think Paul--would!" rallied my Husband with
commendable quickness. "Not with those eyes! Not with that
particular shade of crisp, controlled hair! . . . Complexions like
his aren't made in one generation of righteous nerves and
digestions! . . . Oh no--! Even in the last ditch the worst thing
Paul would do would be to stalk round putting brand new gutters on
a brand new house!"

"Bridge-building is my job--not gutters," grinned Paul unhappily.

"Stalk round building brand new bridges," corrected my Husband.

"Intoxicated with bridges!" triumphed young Kennilworth. "Doped
with specifications!"

"But perhaps Allan John--doesn't know how to build bridges,"
murmured my Husband. "And perhaps in Allan John's family an
occasional Maiden Aunt _or_ Uncle has strayed just a----"

"With the faintest possible gesture of impatience, but still
smiling, the Bridegroom rose from the table and lifted his Bride's
hand very gently from his shoulder.

"Who started this conversation, anyway?" he quizzed.

"I did!" laughed everybody.

"Well, I end it!" said the Bridegroom.

"Oh, thunder!" protested young Kennilworth. In the hollow of his
hand something that once had been the spongy shapeless center of a
breakfast roll crushed back into sponge again. But in the instant
of its crushing, crude as the modeling was, half jest, half child's
play, I sensed the unmistakable parody of a woman's finger-prints
bruising into the soft crest of a man's shoulder. Even in the
absurdity of its substance the sincerity of the thing was
appalling. Catching my eye alone, young Kennilworth gave an amused
but distinctly worldly-wise little laugh.

"Women do care so much, don't they?" he shrugged.

A trifling commotion in the front hall stayed the retort on my lips.

The commotion was Ann Woltor. Coated and hatted and already
half-gloved she loomed blackly from the shadows, trying very hard
to attract my attention.

In my twinge of anxiety about the May Girl I had quite forgotten
Ann Woltor. And in the somewhat heated discussion of Allan John's
responsibilities and irresponsibilities, the May Girl also, it
would seem, had passed entirely from my mind.

"I'm very sorry," explained Ann Woltor, "but with this unfortunate
accident to my tooth I shall have to hurry, of course, right back
to town." Even if you had never heard Ann Woltor speak you could
have presaged perfectly from her face just what her voice would be
like, gravely contralto, curiously sonorous, absolutely without
either accent or emphasis, yet carrying in some strange,
inex-plainable way a rather goose-fleshy sense of stubbornness and
finality. "One can't exactly in a Christian land," droned Ann Woltor,
"go round looking like the sole survivor of a massacre."

Across the somewhat sapient mutual consciousness that ever since we
had first laid eyes on each other five months ago--and goodness
knows how long before that--she had been going round perfectly
serenely 'looking like the sole survivor of a massacre,' Ann Woltor
and I stared just a bit deeply into each other's eyes. The
expression in Ann's eyes was an expression of peculiar poignancy.

"No, of course not!" I conceded with some abruptness. "But surely
if you can find the right dentist and he's clever at all, you ought
to be able to get back here on the six-thirty train to-night!"

"The six-thirty train? Perhaps," murmured Ann Woltor. Once again
her eyes hung upon mine. And I knew and Ann Woltor knew and Ann
Woltor knew that I knew,--that she hadn't the slightest intention
in the world of returning to us on any train whatsoever. But for
some reason known only to herself and perhaps one other, was only
too glad to escape from our party--anatomically impossible as that
escape sounds--through the loop-hole of a broken tooth. Already
both black gloves were fastened, and her black traveling-bag swayed
lightly in one slim, determinate hand. "Your maid has ordered the
station bus for me," she confided; "and tells me that by changing
cars at the Junction and again at Lees--Truly I'm sorry to make any
trouble," she interrupted herself. "If there had been any possible
way of just slipping out without anybody noticing----!"

"Without anybody noticing?" I cried. "Why, Ann, you dear silly!"

At this, my first use of her Christian name, she flashed back at me
a single veiled glance of astonishment, and started for the door.
But before I could reach her side my Husband stepped forward and
blocked her exit by the seemingly casual accident of plunging both
arms rather wildly into the sleeves of his great city-going
raincoat.

"Why the thing is absurd!" he protested. "You can't possibly make
train connections! And there isn't even a covered shed at the
Junction! If this matter is so important I'll run you up to town
myself in the little closed car!"

Across Ann Woltor's imperturbable face an expression that would
have meant an in-growing scream on any other person's countenance
flared up in a single twitching lip-muscle and was gone again.
Behind the smiling banter in my Husband's eyes she also perhaps had
noted a determination quite as stubborn as her own.

"Why--if you insist," she acquiesced, "but it has always distressed
me more than I can say to inconvenience anybody."

"Inconvenience--nothing!" beamed my Husband. Ordinarily speaking my
Husband would not be described I think as having a beaming
expression.

With a chug like the chug of a motor-boat the little closed car
came splashing laboriously round the driveway. Its glassy face was
streaked with tears. Depressant as black life-preservers its two
extra tires gleamed and dripped in their jetty enamel-cloth
casings. A jangle as of dungeon chains clanked heavily from each
fresh revolution of its progress.

Everybody came rushing helpfully to assist in the embarkation.

My Husband's one remark to me flung back in a whisper from the
steering wheel, though frankly confidential, concerned Allan John
alone.

"Don't let Allan John want for anything to-day," he admonished me.
"Keep his body and mind absolutely glutted with bland things like
cocoa and reading aloud . . . And don't wait supper for us!"

With her gay jonquil-colored oil-skin coat swathing her sombre
figure, Ann Woltor slipped into the seat beside him and slammed the
door behind her. Her face was certainly a study.

"Sixty miles to town if it's an inch! How--cosy," mused young
Kennilworth.

"Good-bye!" shouted everybody.

"Good-bye!" waved Ann Woltor and my Husband.

As for Rollins, he was almost beside himself with pride and
triumph. Shuffling joyously from one foot to the other he crowded
to the very edge of the vestibule and with his small fussy face
turned up ecstatically to the rain, fairly exploded into speech the
instant the car was out of earshot.

"She'll look better!" gloated Rollins.

"Who?--the car?" deprecated young Kennilworth.

Then, because everybody laughed out at nothing, it gave me a very
good chance suddenly to laugh out at "nothing" myself. And most
certainly I had been needing that chance very badly for at least
the last fifteen minutes. Because really when you once stopped to
consider the whole thrilling scheme of this "Rainy Week" Play, and
how you and your Husband for years and years had constituted
yourself a very eager, earnest-minded Audience-of-Two to watch how
the Lord Almighty,--the one unhampered Dramatist of the world,
would work out the scenes and colors--the exits and entrances--the
plots and counter plots of the material at hand--it was just a bit
astonishing to have your Husband jump up from his place in the
audience and leap to the stage to be one of the players instead!

It wasn't at all that the dereliction worried your head or troubled
your heart. But it left your elbow so lonely! Who was there left
for your elbow to nudge? When the morning curtain rose on a flight
of sea gulls slashing like white knives through a sheet of silver
rain, or the Night Scene set itself in a plushy black fog that
fairly crinkled your senses; when the Leading Lady's eyes narrowed
for the first time to the Leading Man's startled stare, and the
song you had introduced so casually at the last moment in the last
act proved to be the reforming point in the Villain's nefarious
career, and the one character you had picked for "Comic Relief"
turned out to be the Tragedienne, who in the world was left for
your elbow to nudge?

Swinging back to the breakfast-room I heard the clock strike
ten--only ten?

It was going to be a nice little Play all right! Starting off
already with several quite unexpected situations! And it wouldn't
be the first time by any means that in an emergency I had been
obliged to "double" as prompter and stage hand or water carrier and
critic. But how to double as elbow-nudger I couldn't quite figure.

"Let's go for a tramp on the beach!" suggested the Bridegroom.
Always on the first rainy morning immediately after breakfast some
restive business man suggests "a tramp on the beach!" Frankly we
have reached a point where we quite depend on it for a cue.

Everybody hailed the proposition with delight except Allan John and
Rollins. A zephyr would have blown Allan John from his footing. And
Rollins had to stay in his room to catalogue shells. . . . Rollins
was paid to stay in his room and catalogue shells!

Of the five adventurers who essayed to sally forth, only one failed
to clamor for oil skins. You couldn't really blame the Bride for
her lack of clamoring. . . . The Bride's trousseau was wonderful as
all trousseaux are bound perforce to be that are made up of equal
parts of taste,--money,--fashion,--and passion. No one who had
"saved up" such a costume as the Bride had for the first rainy day
together, could reasonably be expected to doff it for yellow
oil-skins. Of some priceless foreign composition, half cloth, half
mist, indescribably shimmering, almost indecently feminine, with
the frenchiest sort of a little hat gaily concocted of marshgrass
and white rubber pond-lilies, it gave her lovely, somewhat classic
type, all the sudden audacious effect somehow of a water-proofed
valentine.

Young Kennilworth sensed the inherent contrast at once.

"Beside you," he protested, "we look like Yellow Telegrams! . . .
Your Husband there is some Broker's Stock Quotation--sent
'collect!' . . . Mr. Keets is a rather heavily-worded summons to
address the Alumnae of Something-or-other College! . . . I am a
Lunch Invitation to 'Miss Dancy-Prancy of the Sillies!' . . . And
you, of course, Miss Davies," he quickened delightedly, "are a
Night Letter, because you are so long--and inconsequent--all about
rabbits--and puppies--and kiddie things like checked gingham
pinafores!"

Laughing, teasing, arguing, jeering each other's oil-skins,
praising the Bride's splendor, they swept, a young hurricane of
themselves, out into the bigger hurricane of sea and sky, and still
five abreast, still jostling, still teasing, still arguing, passed
from sight around the storm-swept curve of the beach, while I
stayed behind to read aloud to Allan John.

Not that Allan John listened at all. But merely because every time
I stopped reading he struggled up from the lovely soggy depths of
his big leather chair and began to worry. We read two garden
catalogues and a chapter on insect pests. We read a bit of Walter
Pater, and five exceedingly scurrilous poems from a volume of free
verse. It seemed to be the Latin names in the garden catalogues
that soothed him most. And when we weren't reading, we drank malted
milk. Allan John, it seemed, didn't care for cocoa.

But even if I hadn't had Allan John on my mind I shouldn't have
gone walking on the beach. We have always indeed made it a point
not to walk on the beach with our guests on the first rainy,
restive morning of their arrival. In a geographical environment
where every slushy step of sand, every crisp rug of pebbles, every
wind-tortured cedar root, every salt-gnawed crag is as familiar to
us as the palms of our own hands, it is almost beyond human nature
not to try and steer one's visitors to the preferable places, while
the whole point of this introductory expedition demands that the
visitors shall steer themselves. In the inevitable mood of
uneasiness and dismay that overwhelms most house party guests when
first thrust into each other's unfamiliar faces, the initial
gravitations that ensue are rather more than usually significant.
To be perfectly explicit, for instance, people who start off five
abreast on that first rainy walk never come home five abreast!

In the immediate case at hand, nobody came home at all until long
after Allan John and I had finished our luncheon, and in the manner
of that coming, George Keets had gravitated to leadership with the
Bride and Bridegroom. Very palpably with the Bridegroom's
assistance he seemed to be coaxing and urging the Bride's frankly
jaded footsteps, while young Kennilworth and the May Girl brought
up the rear staggering and lurching excitedly under the weight of a
large and somewhat mysteriously colored wooden box.

The Bridegroom and George Keets and young Kennilworth and the May
Girl were as neat as yellow paint. But the poor Bride was ruined.
Tattered and torn, her diaphanous glory had turned to real mist
before the onslaught of wind and rain. Her hat was swamped, her
face streaked with inharmonious colors. She was drenched to the
skin. Her Bridegroom was distracted with anxiety and astonishment.

Everybody was very much excited! Lured by some will-o-the-wisp that
lurks in waves and beaches they had lost their way it seems between
one dune and another, staggered up sand-hills, fallen down
sand-hills, sheltered themselves at last during the worst gust of
all "in a sort of a cave in a sort of a cliff" and sustained life
very comfortably "thank you" on some cakes of sweet chocolate which
George Keets had discovered most opportunely in his big oil-skin
pockets!

But most exciting of all they had found a wreck! "Yes, a real
wreck! A perfectly lovely--beautiful--and quite sufficiently
gruesome real wreck!" the May Girl reported.

Not exactly a whole wreck it had proved to be . . . Not shattered
spars and masts and crumpled cabins with plush cushions floating
messily about. But at least it was a real trunk from a real wreck!
Mrs. Brenswick had spied it first. Just back of a long brown untidy
line of flotsam and jetsam, the sea-weeds, the dead fish, the old
bales and boxes, that every storm brings to the beach, Mrs.
Brenswick had spied the trunk lurching up half-imbedded in the
sand. It must have come in on the biggest wave of all some time
during the night. It was "awfully wet" and yet "not so awfully
wet." Everybody agreed that is, that it wasn't water-logged, that
it hadn't, in short, been rolling around in the sea for weeks or
months but bespoke a disaster as poignantly recent as last night,
on the edge of this very storm indeed that they themselves were now
frivoling in. For fully half an hour, it appeared before even so
much as touching the trunk, they had raced up and down the beach
hunting half hopefully, half fearfully for some added trace of
wreckage, the hunched body even of a survivor. But even with this
shuddering apprehension once allayed, the original discovery had
not proved an altogether facile adventure.

It had taken indeed at the last all their combined energies and
ingenuities to open the trunk. The Bride had broken two finger
nails. George Keets had lost his temper. Paul Brenswick in a final
flare of desperation had kicked in the whole end with an abandon
that seemed to have been somewhat of an astonishment to everybody.
Even from the first young Kennilworth had contested "that the thing
smelt dead." But this unhappy odor had been proved very fortunately
to be nothing more nor less than the rain-sloughed coloring matter
of the Bride's pond-lily hat.

"And here is what we found in the trunk!" thrilled the Bride. In
the palm of her extended hand lay a garnet necklace,--fifty stones
perhaps, flushing crimson-dark in a silver setting of such unique
beauty and such unmistakable Florentine workmanship as stamped the
whole trinket indisputably "precious," if not the stones themselves.

"And there were women's dresses in it," explained Paul Brenswick.
"Rather queer-looking dresses and----"

"Oh, it was the--the--funniest trunk!" cried the May Girl. "All--"
Her eyes were big with horror.

"Anybody could have Sherlocked at a glance," sniffed young
Kennilworth, "that it had been packed by a crazy person!"

"No, I don't agree to that at all!" protested the Bride, whose own
trunk-packing urgencies and emergencies were only too recent in her
mind. "Anybody's liable to pack a trunk like that when he's moving!
The last trunk of all! Every left-over thing that you thought was
already packed or that you had planned to tuck into your suitcase
and found suddenly that you couldn't."

"Why, there was an old-fashioned copper chafing dish!" sniffed
young Kennilworth. "And the top-drawer of a sewing-table fairly
rattling with spools!"

"And books!" frowned George Keets. "The weirdest little old edition
of 'Pilgrim's Progress'!"

"And toys!" quivered the May Girl. "A perfectly gorgeous brand new
box of 'Toy Village'! As huge as--Oh it was awful!"

"As huge as--that!" kicked young Kennilworth wryfully against the
box at his feet. "I wanted to bring the chafing dish," he scolded,
"but nothing would satisfy this young idiot here except that we lug
the Toy Village.----"

"One couldn't bring--everything all at once," deprecated the May
Girl. "Perhaps to-morrow--if it isn't too far--and we ever could
find it again----"

"But why such haste about the 'Toy Village'?" I questioned. "Why
not the dresses? The----"

Hopelessly, but with her eyes like blue skies, her cheeks like
apple-blossoms, the May Girl tried to justify her mental processes.
"Probably I can't explain exactly," she admitted, "but books and
dishes and dresses being just things wouldn't mind being drowned
but toys, I think, would be frightened." With a frank expression of
shock she stopped suddenly and stared all around her. "It doesn't
quite make sense when you say it out loud, does it?" she reflected.
"But when you just feel it--inside----"

"I brought the little 'Pilgrim's Progress' back with me," confessed
George Keets with the faintest possible smile. "Not exactly perhaps
because I thought it would be 'frightened.' But two nights
shipwreck on a New England coast in this sort of weather didn't
seem absolutely necessary."

"And I brought the dinkiest little pearl-handled pistol,"
brightened Paul Brenswick. "It's a peach! Tucked into the pocket of
an old blue cape it was! Wonder I ever found it!"

From a furious rummaging through her pockets the May Girl suddenly
withdrew her hand.

"Of course, we'll have to watch the shipwreck news," said the May
Girl. "Or even advertise, perhaps. So maybe there won't be any real
treasure-trove after all. But just to show that I thought of you,
Mrs. Delville," she dimpled, "here are four very damp spools of red
sewing-silk for your own work-table drawer! Maybe they came all the
way from China! And here's a--I don't know what it is, for Allan
John--I think it's a whistle! And here's a little not-too-soggy
real Morocco-bound blank book for Mr. Rollins when he comes
down-stairs again! And----"

"And for Mr. Delville?" I teased. "And for Ann Woltor?"

With her hand slapped across her mouth in a gesture of childish
dismay, the May Girl stared round at her companions.

"Oh dear--Oh dear--Oh _dear_!" she stammered. "None of us ever
thought once of poor Mr. Delville and Miss Woltor!"

"It's hot eatments and drinkments that you'd better be thinking of
now!" I warned them all with real concern. "And blanket-wrappers!
And downy quilts! Be off to your rooms and I'll send your lunches
up after you! And don't let one of you dare show his drenched face
down-stairs again until suppertime!"

Then Allan John and I resumed our reading aloud. We read Longfellow
this time, and a page or two of Marcus Aurelius, and half a
detective story. And substituted orange juice very mercifully for
what had grown to be a somewhat monotonous carousal in malted milk.
Allan John seemed very much gratified with the little silver
whistle from the shipwreck, and showed quite plainly by various
pursings of his strained lips that he was fairly yearning to blow
it, but either hadn't the breath, or else wasn't sure that such a
procedure would be considered polite. Really by six o'clock I had
grown quite fond of Allan John. It was his haunted eyes, I think
and the lovely lean line of his cheek. But whether he was
animal--vegetable--mineral--Spirituelle--or Intellectuelle, I,
myself, was not yet prepared to say.

The supper hour passed fortunately without fresh complications.
Everybody came down! Everybody's eyes were like stars! And every
body's complexion lashed into sheer gorgeous-ness by the morning's
mad buffet of wind and wave! Best of all, no one sneezed.

Our little Bride was a dream again in a very straight, very severe
gray velvet frock that sheathed her young suppleness like the
suppleness of a younger Crusader. Her regenerated beauty was an
object-lesson to all young husbands' pocket-books for all time to
come that beauty like love is infinitely more susceptible to bad
weather than is either homeliness or hate, and as such must be
cherished by a man's brain as well as by his brawn. Paul Brenswick,
goodness knows, would never need to choose his Bride's clothes for
her. But lusty young beauty-lover that he was by every right of
clean heart and clean living, it was up to him to see that his
beloved was never financially hampered in her own choosing! A
non-extravagant bride, wrecked as his bride had been by the
morning's tempest, might not so readily have recovered her magic.

The May Girl, as usual, was like a spray of orchard bloom in some
white, frothy, middy blouse sort of effect. With the May Girl's
peculiarly fragrant and insouciant type of youthfulness one never
noted somehow just what she wore, nor rated one day's mood of
loveliness against another. The essential miracle, as of May-time
itself, lay merely in the fact that she was here.

Everybody talked, of course, about the shipwreck.

The Bride did not wear her necklace. "It was too ghostly," she
felt. But she carried it in her hand and brooded over it with the
tender, unshakable conviction that once at least it must have
belonged to "another Bride."

Rollins, I thought, was rather unduly enthusiastic about his share
of the booty. Yet no one who knew Rollins could ever possibly have
questioned the absolute sincerity of him. Note-books, it appeared,
were a special hobby of his! Morocco-bound note-books particularly.
And when it came to faintly soggy Morocco-bound note-books, words
were inadequate it seemed to express his appreciation. Nothing
would do but the May Girl must inscribe it for him. "Aberner
Rollins," she wrote very carefully in her round, childish hand,
with a giggly flourish at the tail-tip of each word. "For Aberner
Rollins from his friend May Davies. Awful Shipwreck Time, May 10th,
1919." Rollins used an inestimable number of note-books it appeared
in the collection of his statistics. "The collection of statistics
was the consuming passion of his life," he confided to everybody.
"The consuming passion!" he reiterated emphatically. "Already," he
affirmed, "he had revised and reaudited the whole fresh-egg-account
of his own family for the last three generations! In a single
slender tome," he bragged, "he held listed the favorite flowers of
all living novelists both of America and England! Another tome
bulged with the evidence that would-be suicides invariably waited
for pleasant weather in which to accomplish their self-destruction!
In regard to the little black Morocco volume," he kindled
ecstatically, "he had already dedicated it to a very interesting
new thought which had just occurred to him that evening, apropos of
a little remark--a most significant little remark that had been
dropped during the breakfast chat. . . . If anyone was really
interested--" he suggested hopefully.

Nobody was the slightest bit interested! Nobody paid the remotest
attention to him! Everybody was still too much excited about the
shipwreck, and planning how best to salvage such loot as remained.

"And maybe by to-morrow there'll be even more things washed up!"
sparkled the May Girl. "A real India shawl perhaps! A set of chess-men
carved from a whale's tooth! Only, of course--if it should rain as
hard--" she drooped as suddenly as she had sparkled.

"It can't!" said young Kennilworth. Even with the fresh crash of
wind and rain at the casement he made the assertion arrogantly. "It
isn't in the mind of God," he said, "to make two days as rainy as
this one." The little black Pomeranian believed him anyway, and
came sniffing out of the shadows to see if the arrogantly
gesticulative young hand held also the gift of lump sugar as well
as of prophecy.

It was immediately after supper that the May Girl decided to
investigate the possibilities and probabilities of her "toy
village."

Somewhat patronizingly at first but with a surprisingly rapid
kindling of enthusiasm, young Kennilworth conceded his assistance.

The storm outside grew wilder and wilder. The scene inside grew
snugger and snugger. The room was warm, the lamps well shaded, the
tables piled with books, the chairs themselves deep as waves. "Loaf
and let loaf" was the motto of the evening.

By pulling the huge wolf-skin rug away from the hearth, the May
Girl and young Kennilworth achieved for their village a plane of
smoothness and light that gleamed as fair and sweet as a real
village common at high noon. Curled up in a fluff of white the May
Girl sat cross-legged in the middle of it superintending operations
through a maze of sunny hair. Stretched out at full-length on the
floor beside her, looking for all the world like some beautiful
exotic-faced little lad, young Kennilworth lay on his elbows,
adjusting, between incongruous puffs of cigarette smoke, the
faintly shattered outline of a miniature church and spire, or
soothing a blister of salt sea tears from the paint-crackled visage
of a tiny villa. Softly the firelight flickered and flamed across
their absorbed young faces. Mysteriously the wisps of cigarette
smoke merged realities with unrealities.

It was an entrancing picture. And one by one everybody in the room
except Rollins and myself became drawn more or less into it.

"If you're going to do it at all," argued Paul Brenswick, "you
might as well do it right! When you start in to lay out a village
you know there are certain general scientific principles that must
be observed. Now that list to the floor there! What about drainage?
Can't you see that you've started the whole thing entirely wrong?"

"But I wanted it to face toward the fire," drooped the May Girl,
"like a village looking on the wonders of Vesuvius."

"Vesuvius nothing!" insisted Paul Brenswick. "It's got to have good
drainage!"

Enchanted by his seriousness, the Bride rushed off up-stairs with
her scissors to rip the foliage off her second-best hat to make a
hedge for the church-yard. Even Allan John came sliding just a
little bit out of his chair when he noted that there was a large,
rather humpy papier-mache mountain in the outfit that seemed likely
to be discarded.

"I would like to have that mountain put--there!" he pointed.
"Against that table shadow . . . And the mountain's name is Blue
Blurr!"

"Oh, very well," acquiesced everybody. "The mountain's name is Blue
Blurr!" It was George Keets who suggested taking the little bronze
Psyche from the mantelpiece to make a monument for the public
square. "Of course there'll be some in your village," he
deprecated, "who'll object to its being a nude. But as a classic
it----"

"It's a bear! It's a bear! It's a bear!" chanted Kennilworth in
exultant falsetto. "Speaking of classics!"

"Hush!" said George Keets. . . . George Keets really wanted very
much to play, I think, but he didn't know exactly how to, so he
tried to talk highbrow instead. "This village of yours," he
frowned, "I--I hope it's going to have good government?"

"Well, it isn't!" snapped young Kennilworth. "It's going to be a
terror! But at least it shall be pretty!"

Under young Kennilworth's crafty hand the little village certainly
had bloomed from a child's pretty toy into the very real beauty of
an artist's ideal. The skill of laying out little streets one way
instead of another, the decision to place the tiny red schoolhouse
here instead of there, the choice of a linden rather than a
pinetree to shade an infinitesimal green-thatched cottage, had all
combined in some curious twinge of charm to make your senses
yearn--not that all that cunning perfection should swell suddenly
to normal real estate dimensions--but that you, reduced by some lovely
miracle to toy-size, might slip across that toy-sized greensward
into one of those toy-sized houses, and live with toy-sized
passions and toy-sized ambitions and toy-sized joys and toy-sized
sorrows, one single hour of a toy-sized life.

Everybody, I guess, experienced the same strange little flutter.

"That house shall be mine!" affirmed George Keets quite abruptly.
"That gray stone one with the big bay-window and the pink rambler
rose. The bay-window room I'm sure would make me a fine study.
And----"

From an excessively delicate readjustment of a loose shutter on a
rambling brown bungalow young Kennilworth looked up with a certain
flicker of exasperation.

"Live anywhere you choose!" he snapped. "Miss Davies and I are
going to live--here!"

"W--What?" stammered the May Girl. "What?"

"Here!" grinned young Kennilworth.

"Oh--no," said the May Girl. Without showing the slightest offense
she seemed suddenly to be quite positive about it. "Oh, no!--If I
live anywhere it's going to be in the gray stone house with Mr.
Keets. It's so infinitely more convenient to the schools."

"To the what?" chuckled Kennilworth. Before the very evident
astonishment and discomfiture in George Keets's face, his own was
convulsed with joy.

"To the schools," dimpled the May Girl.

"You do me a--a very great honor," bowed George Keets. His face was
scarlet.

"Thank you," said the May Girl.

In the second's somewhat panicky pause that ensued Rollins flopped
forward with his note-book. Rollins evidently had been waiting a
long and impatient time for such a pause.

"Now speaking of drinking to drown one's Sorrows--" beamed Rollins.

"But we weren't!" observed George Keets coldly.

"But you were this morning!" triumphed Rollins. From the flapping
white pages of the little black note-book he displayed with pride
the entries that he had already made, a separate name heading each
page--Mrs. Delville--Mr. Delville--Mr. Keets--Miss Davies--the list
began. "Now take the hypothesis," glowed Rollins, "that everybody
has got just two bottles stowed away for all time, the very last
bottles I mean that he will ever own, rum--rye--Benedictine--any
thing you choose--and eliminating the first bottle as the less
significant of the two--what are you saving the last one for!"
demanded Rollins.

From a furtive glance at Allan John's graying face and the May
Girl's somewhat startled stare, young Kennilworth looked up with a
rather peculiarly glinting smile.

"Oh, that's easy," said he, "I'm saving mine to break the head of
some bally fool!"

"And my last bottle," interposed George Keets quickly. "My last
bottle--?" In his fine ascetic face the flush deepened suddenly
again, but with the flush the faintest possible little smile showed
also at the lip-line. "Oh, I suppose if I'm really going to have a
wedding--in that little gray toy house, it's up to me to save mine
for a 'Loving Cup' . . . claret . . . Something very mild and rosy
. . . Yes, mine shall be claret."

With her pretty nose crinkled in what seemed like a particularly
abstruse reflection, the May Girl glanced up.

"Bene--benedictine?" she questioned. "Is that the stuff that smells
the way stars would taste if you ate them raw?"

"I really can't say," mused Kennilworth. "I don't think I ever ate
a perfectly raw star. At the night-lunch carts I think they almost
invariably fry them on both sides."

"Night-lunch carts?" scoffed Keets, with what seemed to me like
rather unnecessary acerbity. "N-o, somehow I don't seem to picture
you in a night-lunch cart when it comes time to share your last
bottle of champagne with--with--'Miss Dancy-Prancy of the Sillies,'
wasn't it?"

"My last bottle isn't champagne!" flared young Kennilworth. "It's
scotch! . . . And there'll be no Miss Anybody in it, thank you!"
His face was really angry, and one twitch of his foot had knocked
half his village into chaos. "Oh, all right, I'll tell you what I'm
going to do with my last bottle!" he frowned. "The next-to-the-last-one,
as you say, is none of your business! But the last one is going to
my Old Man! . . . I come from Kansas," he acknowledged a bit
shamefacedly. "From a shack no bigger than this room . . . And my
Old Man lives there yet . . . And he's always been used to having a
taste of something when he wanted it and I guess he misses it some.
. . . And he'll be eighty years old the 15th of next December. I'm
going home for it. . . . I haven't been home for seven years. . . .
But my Old Man is going to get his scotch! . . . If they yank me
off at every railroad station and shoot me at sunrise each new
day,--my Old Man is going to get his scotch!

"Bully for you," said George Keets.

"All the same," argued the May Girl, "I think benedictine smells
better."

With a little gaspy breath somebody discovered what had happened to
the Village.

"Who did that?" demanded Paul Brenswick.

"You did!" snapped young Kennilworth.

"I didn't, either," protested Brenswick.

"Why of all cheeky things!" cried the Bride.

"Now see here," I admonished them, "you're all very tired and very
irritable. And I suggest that you all pack off to bed."

Helping the May Girl up from her cramped position, George Keets
bent low for a single exaggerated moment over her proffered hand.

"I certainly think you are making a mistake, Miss Davies," bantered
young Kennilworth. "For a long run, of course, Mr. Keets might be
better, but for a short run I am almost sure that you would have
been jollier in the brown bungalow with me."

"Time will tell," dimpled the May Girl.

"Then I really may consider us--formally engaged?" smiled George
Keets, still bending low over her hand. He was really rather
amused, I think--and quite as much embarrassed as he was amused.

"No, not exactly formally," dimpled the May Girl. "But until
breakfast time to-morrow morning."

"Until breakfast time to-morrow morning," hooted young Kennilworth.
"That's the deuce of a funny time-limit to put on an engagement . . .
It's like asking a person to go skating when there isn't any
ice!. . ."

"Is it?" puzzled the May Girl.

"What the deuce do you expect Keets to get out of it?" quizzed
young Kennilworth.

In an instant the May Girl was all smiles again. "He'll get
mentioned in my prayers," she said. "'Please bless Mr. Keets, my
fiancé-till-to-morrow-morning.'"

"That's certainly--something," conceded George Keets.

"It isn't enough,"--protested Kennilworth.

The May Girl stared round appealingly at her interlocutors.

"But the time is so awfully short," she said, "and I did want to
get engaged to as many boys as possible in the week I was here."

"What--what!" I babbled.

"Yes, for very special reasons," said the May Girl, "I _would_ like
to get engaged to as many----"

With a strut like the strut of a young ban tam rooster, Rollins
pushed his way suddenly into the limelight.

"If it will be the slightest accommodation to you," he affirmed,
"you may consider your self engaged to me to-morrow!"

Disconcerted as she was, the May Girl swallowed the bitter,
unexpected dose with infinitely less grimace than one would have
expected. She even smiled a little.

"Very well, Mr. Rollins," she said, "I will be engaged to
you--to-morrow."

Young Kennilworth's dismay exploded in a single exclamation.
"Well--you--certainly are an extraordinary young person!"

"Yes, I know," deprecated the May Girl. "It's because I'm so tall,
I suppose----"

Before the unallayed breathlessness of my expression she wilted
like a worried flower.

"Yes, of course, I know, Mrs. Delville," she acknowledged, "that
mock marriages aren't considered very good taste . . . But a mock
engagement?" she wheedled. "If it's conducted, oh, very--very--very
properly?" Her eyes were wide with pleading.

"Oh, of course," I suggested, "if it's conducted very--_very_--_very_
properly!"

Across the May Girl's lovely pink and white cheeks the dark lashes
fringed down.

"There--will--be--no--kissing, affirmed the May Girl.

"Oh, Shucks!" protested young Kennilworth. "Now you've spoiled
everything."

Out of the corner of one eye I saw Rollins nudge Paul Brenswick. It
was not a facetious nudge, but one quite markedly earnest. The
whole expression indeed on Rollins's face was an expression of
acute determination.

With laughter and song and a flicker of candlelight everybody filed
up-stairs to bed.

Rollins carried his candle with the particularly unctuous pride of
one who leads a torchlight procession. And as he turned on the
upper landing and looked back, I noted that-behind the almost
ribald excitement on his face there lurked a look of poignant
wistfulness.

"I've never been engaged before," he confided grinningly to Paul
Brenswick. "I'd like to make the most of it . . ."

Passing into my own room I flung back the casement windows for a
revivifying slash of wind and rain, before I should collapse
utterly into the white scrumptiousness of my bed. Frankly, I was
very tired.

It must have been almost midnight when I woke to see my Husband's
dark figure silhouetted in the bright square of the door. Through
the depths of my weariness a consuming curiosity struggled.

"Did Ann Woltor come back?" I asked.

"She did!" said my Husband succinctly.

"And how did you get on with Allan John?"

"Oh, I'm crazy about Allan John," I yawned amiably. And then with
one of those perfectly inexplainable nerve-explosions that
astonishes no one as much as it astonishes oneself I struggled up
on my elbow.

"But he's still got my best silver saltshaker in his pocket!" I
cried.

It was then that the scream of a siren whistle tore like some
fear-maddened voice through the whole house. Shriller than knives
it ripped and screeched into the senses! Doors banged! Feet
thudded!

"There's Allan John now!" I gasped. "It's the whistle the May Girl
gave him!"

EVERYBODY looked pretty tired when they came down to breakfast the
next morning. But at least everybody came down. Even Rollins! Never
have I seen Rollins so really addicted to coming down to breakfast!

Poor Allan John, of course, was all overwhelmed again with
humiliation and despair, and quite heroically insistent on removing
his presence as expeditiously as possible from our house party. It
_was_ his whistle that had screeched so in the night. And as far as
he knew he hadn't the slightest reason or excuse for so screeching
it beyond the fact that, rousing half-awake and half-asleep from a
most horrible nightmare, he had reached instinctively for the
little whistle under his pillow, and not realizing what he was
doing, cried for help, not just to man alone it would seem,  but to
High Heaven itself!

"But however in the world did you happen to have the whistle under
your pillow?" puzzled the Bride.

"What else have I got?" answered Allan John.

He was perfectly right! Robbed for all time of his wife and child,
stripped for the ill-favored moment of all personal moneys and
proofs of identity, sojourning even in other men's linen, what did
Allan John hold as a nucleus for the New Day except a little silver
toy from another person's shipwreck? (Once I knew a smashed man who
didn't possess even a toy to begin a new day on so he didn't begin
it!)

"Well, of course, it was pretty rackety while it lasted," conceded
young Kennilworth. "But at least it gave us a chance to admire each
other's lingeries."

"Negligées," corrected George Keets.

"I said 'scare-clothes'!" snapped young Kennilworth. "Everybody who
travels by land or sea or puts in much time at house parties ought
to have at least one round of scare-clothes, one really chic
'escaping suit.'"

"The silver whistle is mine," intercepted the May Girl with some
dignity. "Mine and Allan John's. I found it and gave it to Allan
John. And he can blow it any time he wants to, day or night. But as
long as you people all made so much fuss about it--and looked so
funny," dimpled the May Girl transiently, "we will consider that
after this--any time the whistle blows--the call is just for me."
The May Girl's gravely ingenuous glance swept down in sudden
challenge across the somewhat amused faces of her companions,
"Allan John--is mine!" she confided with some incisiveness. "I
found him--too!"

"Do you acknowledge that ownership, Allan John!" demanded young
Kennilworth.

Even Allan John's sombre eyes twinkled the faintest possible glint
of amusement.

"I acknowledge that ownership," acquiesced Allan John.

"Now see here!--I protest," rallied George Keets. "Most
emphatically I protest against my fiancée assuming any masculine
responsibilities except me during the brief term of our
engagement!"

"But your engagement is already over!" jeered young Kennilworth.
"Nice kind of Lochinvar you are--drifting down-stairs just exactly
on the stroke of the breakfast bell!--'until breakfast time' were
the terms, I believe. Now Rollins here has been up since dawn!
Banging in and out of the house! Racing up and down the front walk
in the rain! Now that's what I call real passion!"

At the very first mention of his name Rollins had come sliding way
forward to the edge of his chair. He hadn't apparently expected to
be engaged till after breakfast. But if there was any conceivable
chance, of course----

"All ready--any time!" beamed Rollins.

"_Through_--breakfast time was what I understood," said George
Keets coldly.

"Through breakfast time was--was what I meant," stammered the May
Girl. From the only too palpable excitement on Rollins's face to
George Keets's chill immobility she turned with the faintest
possible gesture of appeal. Her eyes looked suddenly just a little
bit frightened. "A--after all," she confided, "I--I didn't know as
I feel quite well enough to-day to be engaged so much. Maybe I
caught a little cold yesterday. Sometimes I don't sleep very well.
Once----"

"Oh, come now," insisted young Kennilworth. "Don t, for Heaven's
sake, be a quitter!"

"A--'quitter'?" bridled the May Girl. Her cheeks went suddenly very
pink. And then suddenly very white. Like an angry little
storm-cloud that absurd fluff of gray hair shadowed down for an
instant across her sharply averted face. A glint of tears
threatened. Then out of the gray and the gold and the blue and the
pink and the tears, the jolliest sort of a little-girl-giggle
issued suddenly. "Oh, all right!" said the May Girl and slipped
with perfect docility apparently into the chair that George Keets
had drawn out for her.

George Keets I really think was infinitely more frightened than she
was, but in his case, at least, a seventeen years' lead in
experience had taught him long since the advisability of disguising
such emotions. Even at the dining-table of a sinking ship George
Keets I'm almost certain would never have ceased passing salts and
peppers, proffering olives and radishes, or making perfectly sure
that your coffee was just exactly the way you liked it. In the
present emergency, to cover not only his own confusion but the May
Girl's, he proceeded to talk archaeology. By talking archaeology in
an undertone with a faintly amorous inflection to the longest and
least intelligible words, George Keets really believed I think that
he was giving a rather clever imitation of an engaged man. What the
May Girl thought no one could possibly have guessed. The May Girl's
face was a study, but it was at least turning up to his! Whether
she understood a single thing he said, or was only resting, whether
she was truly amused or merely deferring as long as possible her
unhappy fate with Rollins, she sat as one entranced.

Slipping into the chair directly opposite them, young Kennilworth
watched the proceedings with malevolent joy. Between his very frank
contempt for the dulness of George Keets's methods, and his
perfectly palpable desire to keep poor Rollins tantalized as long
as possible, he scarcely knew which side to play on.

Everybody indeed except Ann Woltor seemed to take a more or less
mischievous delight in prolonging poor Rollins's suspense. Allan
John never lifted his eyes from his coffee cup, but at least he
showed no signs of disapproval or haste. Even George Keets, to the
eyes of a close observer, seemed to be dallying rather unduly with
his knife and fork as well as with his embarrassment.

As the breakfast hour dragged along, poor Rollins's impatience grew
apace. Fidgeting round and round in his chair, scowling ferociously
at anyone who dared to ask for a second service of anything,
dashing out into the hall every now and then on perfectly
inexplainable errands, he looked for all the world like some
wry-faced clown performing by accident in a business suit.

"Really, Rollins," admonished my Husband. "I think it would have
been a bit more delicate of you if you'd kept out of sight somehow
till Keets' affair was over--this hovering round so through the
harrowing last moments--all ready to pounce--hanged if I don't
think it's crude!"

"Crude?--it's plain buzzard-y!" scoffed Kennilworth.

It was the Bride's warm, romantic heart that called the time-limit
finally on George Keets's philandering.

"Really, I don't think it's quite fair," whispered the Bride. Taken
all in all I think the Bridegroom was inclined to agree with her.
But stronger than anybody's sense of justice, it was a composite
sense of humor that sped Rollins to his heart's desire. Even Ann
Woltor, I think, was curious to see just how Rollins would figure
as an engaged man.

The May Girl's parting with George Keets was at least mercifully
brief.

"Does he kiss my hand?" questioned the May Girl.

"No--I think not," flushed George Keets. Having no intention in the
world of kissing any woman in earnest, it was not in his code,
apparently, to kiss a young girl in fun. Very formally, with that
frugal, tight-lipped smile of his which contrasted so curiously
with the rather accentuated virility of his shoulders, he rose and
bowed low over the May Girl's proffered fingers. "Really it's been
a great honor. I've enjoyed it immensely!" he conceded.

"Thank you," murmured the May Girl. In a single impulse everybody
turned to look at Rollins, only to find that Rollins had
disappeared.

"Hi, there, Rollins! _Rollins_!" shouted young Kennilworth. "You're
losing time!"

As though waiting dramatically for just this cue, the hall
portieres parted slightly, and there stood Rollins grinning like a
Cheshire Cat, with a great bunch of purple orchids clasped in one
hand! Now we are sixty miles from a florist and the only neighbor
of our acquaintance who boasts a greenhouse is a most estimable but
exceedingly close-fisted flower-fancier, who might under certain
conditions, I must admit, give bread at the back door, but who
never under any circumstances whatsoever has been known to give
orchids at the front door. Nor did I quite see Rollins even in a
rain-storm actually breaking laws or glass to achieve his floral
purpose. Yet there stood Rollins in our front hall, at half-past
nine in the morning, with a very extravagant bunch of purple
orchids in his hand.

"Well--bully for you!" gasped young Kennilworth. "Now that's what I
call not being a mutt!"

Beaming with pride Rollins stepped forward and presented his
offering, the grin on his face never wavering.

"Just a--just a trifling token of my esteem, Miss Davies!" he
affirmed. "To say nothing of--of----"

The May Girl, I think, had never had orchids presented to her
before. It is something indeed of an experience all in itself to
see a young girl receive her first orchids. The faint astonishment
and regret to find that after all they're not nearly as darling and
cosy as violets or roses or even carnations--the sudden
contradictory flare of sex-pride and importance--flashed like so
much large print across the May Girl's fluctuant face.

"Why--why they're--wonderful!" she stammered.

Producing from Heaven knows what antique pin-cushion a hat-pin that
would have easily impaled the May Girl like a butterfly against the
wall, Rollins completed the presentation. But the end it seemed was
not yet. Fumbling through his pockets he produced a small wad of
paper, and from that small wad of paper a large old-fashioned seal
ring with several strands of silk thread dangling from it.

"Of course at such short notice," beamed Rollins, "one couldn't
expect to do much. But if you don't mind things being a bit
old-timey,--this ring of my great uncle Aberner's--if we tie it
on--perhaps?"

Whereupon, lashing the ring then and there to the May Girl's
astonished finger, Rollins proceeded to tuck the May Girl's whole
astonished hand into the crook of his arm, and start off with
her--still grinning--to promenade the long sheltered glassed-in
porch, across whose rain-blurred windows the storm raged by more
like a sound than a sight.

The May Girl's face was crimson!

"Well it was all your own idea, you know, this getting engaged!"
taunted Kennilworth.

It was not a very good moment to taunt the May Girl. My Husband saw
it I think even before I did.

"Really, Rollins," he suggested, "you mustn't overdo this arm-in-arm
business. Not all day long! It isn't done! Not this ball-and-chain
idea any more! Not this shackling of the betrothed!"

"No, really, Rollins, old man," urged young Kennilworth, "you've
got quite the wrong idea. You say yourself you've never been
engaged before, so you'd better let some of us wiser guys coach you
up a bit in some of the essentials."

"Coach me up a bit?" growled Rollins.

"Why, you didn't suppose for a minute, did you," persisted young
Kennilworth tormentingly, "that there was any special fun about
being engaged? You didn't think for a moment, I mean, that you were
really going to have any sort of good time to-day? Not both of you,
I mean?"

"Eh?" jerked Rollins, stopping suddenly short in his tracks, but
with the May Girl's reluctant hand still wedged fast into the crook
of his arm, he stood defying his tormentor. "Eh? _What_?"

"Why I never in the world," mused Kennilworth, "ever heard of two
engaged people having a good time the same day. One or the other of
them always has to give up the one thrilling thing that he yearned
most to do and devote his whole time to pretending that he's
perfectly enraptured doing some stupid fuddy-duddy stunt that the
other one wanted to do. It's simply the question always--of who
gives up! Now, Miss Davies for instance--" Mockingly he fixed his
eyes on the May Girl's unhappy face. "Now, Miss Davies," he
insisted, "more than anything else in the world to-day what would
you like to do?"

"Sew," said the May Girl.

"And you, Mr. Rollins," persisted Kennilworth. "If it wasn't for
Miss Davies here--what would you be doing to-day?"

"I?" quickened Rollins. "I?" across his impatient, irritated face,
an expression of frankly scientific ecstasy flared up like an
explosion. "Why those shells, you know!" glowed Rollins. "That last
consignment! Why I should have been cataloging shells!"

"There you have it!" cried Kennilworth. "Either you've got to sew
all day long with Miss Davies--or else she'll have to catalog
shells with you!"

"Sew?" hooted Rollins.

"Oh, I'd just love to catalog shells!" cried the May Girl. In that
single instant the somewhat indeterminate quiver of her lips had
bloomed into a real smile. By a dexterous movement, released from
Rollins's arm, she turned and fled for the door. "Up-stairs, you
mean, don't you?" she cried. The smile had reached her eyes now. In
another minute it seemed as though even her hair would be all
laughter. "At the big table in the upper hall? Where you were
working yesterday? One, on one side of the table--and one--the
other? And one, the _other_!" she giggled triumphantly.

With unflagging agility Rollins started after her.

"What I had really planned," he grinned, "was a walk on the beach."

"Arm--in--arm!" mused young Kennilworth.

"Eh! You think you're smart, don't you!" grinned Rollins.

"Yes, quite so," acknowledged Kennilworth. "But if you really want
to see smartness on its native heath just pipe your eye to-morrow
when I dawn on the horizon as an engaged man!"

"You?" called the May Girl. Staring back through the mahogany
banisters her face looked fairly striped with astonishment.

"You certainly announced your desire," said Kennilworth, "to go
right through the whole list. Didn't you?"

"Oh, but I didn't mean--everybody," parried the May Girl. Her mouth
and her eyes and her hair were all laughing together now. "Oh,
Goodness me--not _everybody_!" she gesticulated, with a fine air of
disdain.

"Not the married men," explained the Bride.

"No, I'm sure she discriminated against the married men," chuckled
the Bridegroom.

"Well--she sha'n't discriminate against _me_!" snapped young
Kennilworth. Absurd as it was he looked angry. Young Kennilworth,
one might infer, was not accustomed to having women discriminate
against him. "You made the plan and you'll jolly-well keep to it!"
affirmed young Kennilworth.

"Oh, all right," laughed the May Girl. "If you really insist! But for
a boy who's as truly unselfish as you are about nursery-governessing
other people's Pom dogs, and saving your last taste of anything for
your old Old Daddy--you've certainly got the worst manners!

"Manners!" drawled George Keets. "This is no test. Wait--till you
see his engagement manners!"

"Oh, she'll 'wait' all right!" sniffed young Kennilworth, and
turned on his heel.

Paul Brenswick, searching hard through the shipping news in the
morning paper, looked up with a faint shadow of concern.

"What's the grouch?" he questioned.

Standing with her hands on her Bridegroom's shoulders the Bride
glanced back from the stormy window to Kennilworth's face with a
somewhat provocative smile.

"Well--it _was_ in the mind of God, wasn't it?" she said.

"What was!" demanded young Kennilworth.

"The rain," shrugged the Bride.

"Oh--damn the rain!" cried young Kennilworth. "I wish people
wouldn't speak to me! It drives me crazy I tell you to have
everybody babbling so! Can't you see I want to work? Can't anybody
see--anything?" Equally furious all of a sudden at everybody, he
swung around and darted up the stairs. "Don't anybody call me to
lunch," he ordered. "For Heaven's sake don't let anyone be idiot
enough to call me to lunch."

Even Ann Woltor's jaw dropped a bit at the amazing rudeness and
peevishness of it.

It was then that the beaming grin on Rollins's face flickered out
for a single instant of incredulity and reproach.

"Why--Miss Woltor!" he choked, "you didn't have your tooth
fixed--after all!"

With a great crackle of paper every man's face seemed buried
suddenly in the shipping news.

"No!" I heard my Husband's voice affirm with extravagant precision,
"not the slightest mention anywhere of any maritime disaster."

"Not the slightest!" agreed George Keets.

"Not the slightest!" echoed Paul Brenswick with what seemed to me
like quite unnecessary monotony.

It was the Bride who showed the only real tact. Slipping her hand
casually into Ann Woltor's hand she started for the Library.

"Let's go see if we can't find something awfully exciting to read
to-day," she suggested. Once across the library threshold her voice
lowered slightly. "Really, Miss Woltor," she confided, "there are
times when I think that Mr. Rollins is sort of crazy."

"So many people are," acquiesced Ann Woltor without emotion.

Caroming off to my miniature conservatory on the pretext of
watering my hyacinths I met my Husband bent evidently on the same
errand. My Husband's sudden interest in potted plants was
bewitching. Even the hyacinths were amused I think. Yet even to
prolong the novelty of the situation there was certainly no time to
be lost about Rollins.

"Truly Jack," I besought him, "this Rollins man has got to be
suppressed."

"Oh, not to-day--surely?" pleaded my Husband. "Not on the one
engagement day of his life? Poor Rollins--when he's having such a
thrill?"

"Well--not to-day perhaps," I conceded with some reluctance. "But
to-morrow surely! We never have been used you know to starting off
the day with Rollins! And two breakfasts in succession? Well,
really, it's almost more than the human heart can stand. Far be it
from me," I argued, "to condone poor Allan John's lapse from
sobriety or advocate any plan whatsoever for the ensnaring of the
very young or the unwary; but all other means failing," I argued,
"I should consider it a very great mercy to the survivors if
Rollins should wake to-morrow with a slight headache. No real
cerebral symptoms you understand--nothing really acute. Just----!"

"Oh, stop your fooling!" said my Husband. "What I came in here to
talk to you about was Miss Woltor."

"'Woltor' or 'Stoltor'?" I questioned.

"Who said 'Stoltor'?" jerked my Husband.

"Oh, sometimes you say 'Woltor' and sometimes you say 'Stoltor'!" I
confided. "And it's so confusing. Which is it--really?"

"Hanged if I know!" said my Husband.

"Then let's call her Ann," I suggested.

With an impulse that was quite unwonted in him my Husband stepped
suddenly forward to my biggest, rosiest, most perfect pot of pink
hyacinths, and snapping a succulent stem in two thrust the great
gorgeous bloom incongruously into his button-hole. Never in fifteen
years had I seen my Husband with a flower in his button-hole.
Neither, in all that time, had I ever seen him flush across the
cheek-bones just exactly the shade of a rose-pink Hyacinth. I could
have hugged him! He looked so confused.

"Oh, I say--" he ventured quite abruptly, "Miss Woltor and I, you
know,--we never went near the dentist yesterday!"

"So I inferred," I said, "from Rollins's observation. What _were_
you doing?" Truly I didn't mean to ask, but the long-suppressed
wonder most certainly slipped.

"Why we were just arguing!" groaned my Husband. "Round and round
and round!"

"Round--what?" I questioned--now that the slipping had started.
"Round and round the country?"

"Country, no indeed!" grinned my Husband unhappily. "We never left
the place!"

"Never--left the place?" I stammered. "Why, where in Creation were
you?"

"Why, first," said my Husband, "we were down at the end of the
driveway right there by the acacia trees, you know. She was crying
so I didn't exactly like to strike the state highway for fear
somebody would notice her. And then afterward--when I saw that she
really couldn't stop----"

"Crying?" I puzzled. "Ann Woltor--crying?"

"And then afterward," persisted my Husband, "we went over to the
Bungalow on the Rock and commenced the argument all over again!
Fortunately there was some tea there and crackers and sardines and
enough firewood. But it was the devil and all getting over! We ran
the car into the boat-house and took the punt! I thought the surf
would smash us, but----"

"But what was the 'argument'?" I questioned.

"Why about her coming back!" said my Husband. "She was so
absolutely determined not to come back! I never in my life saw such
stubbornness! And if she once got away I knew perfectly well that
she never would come back! That she'd drop out of sight just as--And
such crying!" he interrupted himself with apparent irrelevance.
"Everything smashed up altogether at once!--Hadn't cried before,
she said, for eight years!"

"Well, it's time she cried, the poor dear!" I affirmed sincerely.
"But----"

"But I couldn't bring her back to the house!" insisted my Husband.
"Not crying so, not arguing so!"

"No, of course not," I agreed.

"I kept thinking she'd stop!" shivered my Husband.

"Jack," I asked quite abruptly, "Who is Ann Woltor?"

"Search me!" said my Husband, "I never saw her before."

"You--never saw her--before!" I stammered. "Why--why you called her
by name!--you----"

"I knew her face," said my Husband. "I've seen her picture. In
London it was. In Hal Ferry's studio. Fifteen years ago if it's a
day. A huge charcoal sketch all swoops and smouches.--Just a girl
holding up a small hand-mirror to her astonished face.--'_The woman
with the broken tooth_' it was called."

"Fifteen years ago?" I gasped. "'_The--the woman with the broken
tooth_!' What a--what a name for a picture!

"Yes, wasn't it?" said my Husband. "And you'd have thought somehow
that the picture would be funny, wouldn't you? But it wasn't! It
was the grimmest thing I ever saw in my life! Sketched just from
memory too it must have been. No man would have had the cheek to
ask a woman to pose for him like that,--to reduplicate just for fun
I mean that particular expression of bewilderment which he had by
such grim chance surprised on her unwitting face. Such shock! Such
_astonishment_! It wasn't just the astonishment you understand of
Marred Beauty worrying about a dentist. But a look the stark,
staring, chain-lightning sort of look of a woman who, back of the
broken tooth, linked up in some way with the accident of the broken
tooth, saw something, suddenly, that God Himself couldn't repair!
It was horrid, I tell you! It haunted you! Even if you started to
hoot you ended by arguing! Arguing and--wondering! Ferry finally
got so that he wouldn't show it to anybody. People quizzed him so."

"Yes, but Ferry?" I questioned.

"No," said my Husband. "It was only by the merest chance that I
heard the name Ann Stoltor associated in any way with the picture.
Hal Ferry never told anything. Not a word. But he never exhibited
the picture, I noticed. It was a point of honor with him, I
suppose. If one lives long enough, of course, one's pretty apt to
catch every friend off guard at least once in his facial
expression. But one doesn't exhibit one's deductions I suppose. One
mustn't at least make professional presentation of them."

"Yes, but Ann Woltor--Stoltor," I puzzled. "When she tried to bolt
so? Was it because she knew that you knew Hal Ferry? When you
called her Stoltor and dropped the lantern so funnily when you
first saw her, was it then that she linked you up with this
something--whatever it is that has hurt her so?--And determined
even then to bolt at the very first chance she could get? But why
in the world should she want to bolt?" I puzzled. "Certainly she's
had to take us on faith quite as much as we've taken her. And I?--I
_love_ her!"

In the flare of the open doorway George Keets loomed quite
abruptly.

"Oh, is this where you bad people are?" he reproached us. "We've
been searching the house for you."