"I can not help being troubled," he returned, just as evenly. "'You see,

it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.'"

Luckily, at that moment Dal came in. He pushed his way through the

crowd without a word, shut off the lights, crashed through the pans and

slammed the shutters closed. Then he turned and addressed the rest.

"Of all the lunatics--!" he began, only there was more to it than that.

"A fellow goes to all kinds of trouble to put an end to this miserable

situation, and the entire household turns out and sets to work to

frustrate the whole scheme. You LIKE to stay here, don't you, like

chickens in a coop? Where's Flannigan?"

Nobody understood Dal's wrath then, but it seems he meant to arrange

the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour nearly come, he

intended to wager that he could break the quarantine, and to take any

odds he could get that he would free the entire party in half an hour.

As for the plan itself, it was idiotically simple; we were perfectly

delighted when we heard it. It was so simple and yet so comprehensive.

We didn't see how it COULD fail. Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the

strength of it, and Anne was furious. Jim was not so much pleased, for

some reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than

merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.

The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the

windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is

used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and

yelled "fire" and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the

front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement

kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as

quickly as we could.

You can see how simple it was.

We were terribly excited, of course. Every one rushed madly for motor

coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people going the

same direction would have the same machine. We called to each other as

we dressed about Mamaroneck or Lakewood or wherever we happened to have

relatives. Everybody knew everybody else, and his friends. The Mercer

girls were going to cruise until the trouble blew over, the Browns were

going to Pinehurst, and Jim was going to Africa to hunt, if he could get

out of the harbor.

Only the Harbison man seemed to have no plans; quite suddenly with the

world so near again, the world of country houses and steam yachts and

all the rest of it, he ceased to be one of us. It was not his world at

all. He stood back and watched the kaleidoscope of our coats and veils,

half-quizzically, but with something in his face that I had not seen

there before. If he had not been so self-reliant and big, I would have

said he was lonely. Not that he was pathetic in any sense of the word.

Of course, he avoided me, which was natural and exactly what I wished.

Bella never was far from him and at the last she loaded him with her

jewel case and a muff and traveling bag and asked him to her cousins' on

Long Island. I felt sure he was going to decline, when he glanced across

at me.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024