CHAPTER III
EVERYBODY looked pretty tired when they came down to breakfast the next morning. But at least everybody came down. Even Rollins! Never have I seen Rollins so really addicted to coming down to breakfast!
Poor Allan John, of course, was all overwhelmed again with humiliation and despair, and quite heroically insistent on removing his presence as expeditiously as possible from our house party. It was his whistle that had screeched so in the night. And as far as he knew he hadn't the slightest reason or excuse for so screeching it beyond the fact that, rousing half-awake and half-asleep from a most horrible nightmare, he had reached instinctively for the little whistle under his pillow, and not realizing what he was doing, cried for help, not just to man alone it would seem, but to High Heaven itself!
"But however in the world did you happen to have the whistle under your pillow?" puzzled the Bride.
"What else have I got?" answered Allan John.
He was perfectly right! Robbed for all time of his wife and child, stripped for the ill-favored moment of all personal moneys and proofs of identity, sojourning even in other men's linen, what did Allan John hold as a nucleus for the New Day except a little silver toy from another person's shipwreck? (Once I knew a smashed man who didn't possess even a toy to begin a new day on so he didn't begin it!)
"Well, of course, it was pretty rackety while it lasted," conceded young Kennilworth. "But at least it gave us a chance to admire each other's lingeries."
"Negligées," corrected George Keets.
"I said 'scare-clothes'!" snapped young Kennilworth. "Everybody who travels by land or sea or puts in much time at house parties ought to have at least one round of scare- clothes, one really chic 'escaping suit.'"
"The silver whistle is mine," intercepted the May Girl with some dignity. "Mine and Allan John's. I found it and gave it to Allan John. And he can blow it any time he wants to, day or night. But as long as you people all made so much fuss about it—and looked so funny," dimpled the May Girl transiently, "we will consider that after this—any time the whistle blows—the call is just for me." The May Girl's gravely ingenuous glance swept down in sudden challenge across the somewhat amused faces of her companions, "Allan John—is mine!" she confided with some incisiveness. "I found him—too!"