Jim was sulky. He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs,

looking gloomily at nothing. Then he got up and ambled into his den,

closing the door behind him without having spoken a word. It was more

than human nature could stand.

When I went into the den he was stretched on the davenport with his face

buried in the cushions. He looked absolutely wilted, and every line of

him was drooping.

"Go on out, Kit," he said, in a smothered voice. "Be a good girl and

don't follow me around."

"You are shameless!" I gasped. "Follow you! When you are hung around

my neck like a--like a--" Millstone was what I wanted to say, but I

couldn't think of it.

He turned over and looked up from his cushions like an ill-treated and

suffering cherub.

"I'm done for, Kit," he groaned. "Bella went up to the studio after we

left, and investigated that corner."

"What did she find? The necklace?" I asked eagerly. He was too wretched

to notice this.

"No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy--she says

she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro's room and take smallpox and

die."

"Fiddlesticks!" I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and

opened it.

"Pardon me for disturbing you," Bella said, in her best

dear-me-I'm-glad-I-knocked manner. "But--Flannigan says the dinner has

not come."

"Good Lord!" Jim exclaimed. "I forgot to order the confounded dinner!"

It was eight o'clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least

after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The

entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted

Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes

every minute. And then--he couldn't raise Central. It was fifteen

minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another

despairingly.

"Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to

do something useful for once," Max suggested. But he was indignantly

hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the

transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch

that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of

breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that

didn't seem to lend itself to anything.

We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around

the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk

about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little

town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe

while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina

related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in

cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.




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