"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—Ohdear!" 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, "Iwouldlike 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—veryproperly!"
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. Itwashis 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, theother!" 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—noteverybody!" 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 againstme!" 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—itwasin 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. Whatwereyou 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! Suchastonishment!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?—Iloveher!"
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."
"Oh, of course, if you really need us," conceded my Husband. "But even you, I should think, would know a flirtation when you saw it and have tact enough not to butt in."
"A flirtation?" scoffed Keets. "You? At ten o'clock in the morning? All trimmed up like an Easter bonnet! And acting half scared to death? It looks a bit fishy to me, not to say mysterious!"
"All Husbands move in a mysterious way their flirtations to perform," observed my Husband.
From one pair of half-laughing eyes to the other George Keets glanced up with the faintest possible suggestion of a sigh.
"Really, you know," said George Keets, "there are times when evenIcan imagine that marriage might be just a little bit jolly."
"Oh never jolly," grinned my Husband, "but there are times I frankly admit—when it seems a heap more serious than it does at other times."
"Less serious, you mean," corrected Keets.
"More serious," grinned my Husband.
"Oh, for goodness sake, let's stop talking about us," I protested, "and talk about the weather!"
"It was the weather that I came to talk about," exclaimed George Keets. "Do you think it will clear to-day?" he questioned.
For a single mocking instant my Husband's glance sought mine.
"No, not to-day, George," he said.
"U—m!" mused George Keets. "Then in that case," he brightened suddenly, "if Mrs. Delville is really willing to put up a water-proof lunch we think it would be rather good sport to go back to the cave and explore a bit more of the beach perhaps and bring home Heaven knows what fresh plunder from the shipwrecked trunk."
"Oh, how jolly!" I agreed. "But will Mrs. Brenswick go?"
"Mrs. Brenswick isn't exactly keen about it," admitted Keets. "But she says she'll go. And Brenswick himself and Miss Woltor and Allan John—" It was amusing how everybody called Allan John "Allan John" without title or subterfuge or self- consciousness of any kind.
With their arms across each other's shoulders the Bride and Bridegroom came frolicking by on their way to the foot of the stairs.
"Oh, Miss Davies!—Miss Davies!" they called up teasingly. "Are you willing that Allan John should go to the cave to- day?"
Smiling responsively but not one atom teased, the May Girl jumped up from her tableful of shells and came out to the edge of the balustrade to consider the matter.
"Allan John! Allan John!" she called. "Do you really want to go?"
"Why, yes," admitted Allan John, "if everybody's going."
Behind the May Girl's looming height and loveliness the little squat figure of Rollins shadowed suddenly.
"Miss Davies and I are not going," said Rollins.
"Not—going?" questioned the May Girl.
"Not going," chuckled Rollins, "unless she walks with me!" He didn't say "arm-in-arm." He didn't need to. That inference was entirely expressed by the absurdly triumphant little glint in his eye.
I don't think the May Girl intended to laugh. But she did laugh. And all the laugh in the world seemed suddenly "on" Rollins.
"No—really, People," rallied the May Girl, "I'd heaps rather stay here with Mr. Rollins and work on these perfectly darling shells. One—on one side of the table—and one on the other."
"We are going to have lunch up here—in fact," counterchecked that rascally Rollins with a blandness that was actually malicious. "There is a magnificent specimen here I notice of 'Triton's Trumpet'. The Pacific Islanders I understand use it very successfully for a tea-kettle. And for tea-cups. With the aid of one or two Hare's Ears which I'm almost sure I've seen in the specimen cabinet——"
"'Hare's Ears'?" gasped the May Girl.
"It's the name of a shell, my dear,—just the name of a shell," explained Rollins with some unctuousness. "Very comfortable here we shall be, I am sure!" beamed Rollins. "Very cosy, very scientific, very ro-romantic, if I may take the liberty of saying so. Very——"
"Oh, Shucks!" interrupted George Keets quite surprisingly. "If Miss Davies isn't going there's no good in anybody going!"
"Thank—you," murmured Ann Woltor. At the astonishingly new and relaxed timbre of her voice everybody turned suddenly and stared at her. It wasn't at all that she spoke meltingly, but the fact of her speaking meltedly, that gave every one of us that queer little gasp of surprise. Still icy cold, but fluid at last, her voice flowed forth as it were for the very first time with some faint suggestion of the real emotion in her mind. "Thank you—Mr. Keets," mocked Ann Woltor, "for your enthusiasm concerning the rest of us."
"Oh, I say!" deprecated George Keets. "You know what I meant!" His face was crimson. "It—it was only that Miss Davies was so awfully keen about it all yesterday! Everybody, you know, doesn't find it so exhilarating."
"No-o?" murmured Ann Woltor. In the plushy black somberness of her eyes a highlight glinted suddenly. Suppressed tears make just that particular kind of glint. So also does suppressed laughter. "I was out in a storm—once," drawled Ann Woltor, "I found it very—exhilarating."
With a flash of rather quizzical perplexity I saw my Husband's glance rake hers.