"

"Then she's broken her word. She--"

"The Pot called the Kettle black."

"But to tell one's own wife is different. I thought she could keep a
secret."

"How can you expect a person to keep a secret when you can't keep it
yourself?" Peter and Ray were both laughing.

Ray said to himself, "Peter has some awfully knotty point on hand, and
is resting the brain tissue for a moment." Ray had noticed, when Peter
interrupted him during office hours, on matters not relating to
business, that he had a big or complex question in hand.

Peter closed the door and went back to his room. Then he took a fifth
sheet of paper, and wrote:

"WATTS: A day's thought has brought a change of feeling on my
part. Neither can be the better for alienation or unkind thoughts.
I regret already my attitude of yesterday. Let us cancel all that
has happened since our college days, and put aside as if it had
never occurred.

"PETER"

Just as he had finished this, his door opened softly. 'Peter did not
hear it, but took the letter up and read it slowly.

"Boo!"

Peter did not jump at the Boo. He looked up very calmly, but the moment
he looked up, jump he did. He jumped so that he was shaking hands
before the impetus was lost.

"This is the nicest kind of a surprise," he said.

"Bother you, you phlegmatic old cow," cried a merry voice. "Here we have
spent ten minutes palavering your boy, in order to make him let us
surprise you, and then when we spring it on you, you don't budge. Wasn't
it shabby treatment, Dot?"

"You've disappointed us awfully, Mr. Stirling."

Peter was shaking hands more deliberately with Leonore than he had with
Watts. He had been rather clever in shaking hands with him first, so
that he need not hurry himself over the second. So he had a very nice
moment--all too short--while Leonore's hand lay in his. He said, in
order to prolong the moment, without making it too marked, "It will take
something more frightful than you, Miss D'Alloi, to make me jump." Then
Peter was sorry he had said it, for Leonore dropped her eyes.

"Now, old man, give an account of yourself." Watts was speaking
jauntily, but not quite as easily as he usually did. "Here Leonore and I
waited all last evening, and you never came. So she insisted that we
come this morning."

"I don't understand?" Peter was looking at Leonore as if she had made
the remark. Leonore was calmly examining Peter's room.

"Why, even a stran