ppose we eat together?"

"Scrumptious!" There was no hint of hesitation in her manner. "I've been
hoping ever since we met that you'd ask me."

They found a table mercifully secluded in the corner of the main dining
room of the city's leading hotel. For once Carroll felt gratitude for the
notoriously slow service. He begged her to order--and she did: ordered a
meal which contained T.N.T. possibilities for acute indigestion. Carroll
smiled and let her have her way--he was amused at her valiant efforts to
appear the blase society woman.

"I really did enjoy our conversation last night, Miss Rogers."

"Oh! piffle! I don't fall for that."

"I did."

"Then why did you beat it so quick?"

"Well, you see--I suppose I was jealous of your elegantly dressed
young friend."

"Him? He's just a kid. A mere _child_!"

"He seemed very much at home."

"Kids like him always do. They make me sick--always putting on as though
they were grown up."

She secured an olive and bit into it with a relish. "Awful good--these
olives. I love queen olives, don't you. I used to be crazy about ripe
olives, but I read in a book once that sometimes they poison you, and
when they do--there just simply isn't any anecdote in the world that can
save you. So I figured there wasn't any use taking chances--"

Carroll let her run on until the meal was served. And it was then when
she was satisfying a normal youthful appetite that he drove straight to
the subject which had led to this masculine martyrdom.

"The day before Mr. Warren died," he said mildly--"are you sure that your
sister made the suggestion that you spend the night with Miss Gresham?"

"Her? Sure she did."

"Didn't it strike you as peculiar--knowing that she'd be in the house
alone all that night?"

"I'll say it did. I asked her was she nutty and she scolded me for being
slangy. So I told her I should worry--if she wanted to suffer alone, and
I went with Hazel. And it's an awful good thing I did, because if I
hadn't she would have been arrested and tried and convicted and
hanged--or something, and--"

"Oh! hardly that bad. You're sure your sister was alone in the house
that night?"

"Sure. Who could have been there with her?"

"I'm not answering riddles. I'm asking them."

"I've got my fingers crossed. The answer is that there wasn't any one
there. At first I thought she was going out--but she wasn't, and when I
asked her was she, she got real peeved at me."

"Aa-a-h! Yo