"Nibbetts has gone to Scotland," Shucks finally told her.
"Is it possible he's still running after his marmalade lass?" she laughed. "You men do have odd tastes."
"Something wrong with Nibbetts—that's a fact," declared his grace bluntly. "Does most unheard-of things."
"I don't understand," she said, turning to him with sudden seriousness. "What unheard-of things, for example?"
But here the duchess intervened. "Do be still, Pucketts. You're very hard on Nibbetts. You always were. He's never been anything but eccentric. Why magnify a phase of it into something extraordinary?"
"Because it is extraordinary," the duke defended. "Fancy a man haunting the tiger-house at the Zoölogical Gardens day after day, and for hours at a stretch! It's not sane, you know."
Nina bent her veiled face closer to him. "Does Hal Kneedrock do that?" she asked.
"He did," was the answer. "I saw him there myself. Others saw him. I say, Doody, didn't I see Nibbetts in the tiger-house?"
"I dare say you did," his wife confirmed. "But what of it?"
"It's very odd, I say. Very odd. It looks like second childhood. The kiddies like to go to the tiger-house."