Rainy Week

by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

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!"