opposite of those of
the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it
up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down
into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind--there was something
so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight--but she
resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was
responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go
maudlin. So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her
own corner.

She did not think beyond the address she had given to the chauffeur until
they pulled up at her door. Then she turned to Rush and asked, "Where
shall he take you? Are you staying at a hotel?"

"I am going to take you home," he said precisely.

She saw she did not dare to let him go. There was no telling what serious
trouble he might get into, in his illicit civilian dress, if she turned
him adrift now. So she said, simply, "Well, here we are. Come in."

She opened the street door with her latch-key, and punched on the hall
lights. She dreaded the two flights of stairs, but with the help of the
banister rail he negotiated them successfully enough. And then he was
safely brought to anchor in her sitting-room. It was plain he had not the
vaguest idea where he was.

"I'll make some coffee," she said. "That will--pull us both together. And
it won't take a minute because it's all ready to make for breakfast."

She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back
from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged
beyond all soundings. So she tugged him around into a more comfortable
position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat,
unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him
up with an eiderdown quilt. Then she kissed him--it was five years since
she had done that--and went, herself, to bed.

At ten o'clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast
table--it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a
grapefruit and a plate of toast--waiting, over _The Times_, for Rush to
wake up. She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish
toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid. Her brother lay on the
divan just as she had left him the night before. Presently the change in
his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of
sleep. She looked over at him and saw