of it. If Arabella hadn't made a diversion just
then I think I'd have fainted.

She'd pulled the newspaper and the tights off the table and was running
around the room with them, one leg in her mouth.

"Stop it, Arabella!" said Miss Julia, and took the tights from her.
"Yours?" she asked, with her eyebrows raised.

"No--yes," I answered.

"I'd never have suspected you of them!" she remarked. "Hardly sheer
enough to pull through a finger ring, are they?" She held them up and
gazed at them meditatively. "That's one thing I draw the line at. On
the boards, you know--never have worn 'em and never will. They're not
modest, to my mind,--and, anyhow, I'm too fat!"

Mr. Sam and his wife came in at that moment, Mr. Sam carrying a bottle
of wine for the shelter-house, wrapped in a paper, and two cans of
something or other. He was too busy trying to make the bottle look like
something else--which a good many people have tried and failed at--to
notice what Miss Summers was doing, and she had Miss Cobb's protectors
stuffed in her muff and was standing very dignified in front of the fire
by the time they'd shaken off the snow.

"Good morning!" she said.

"Morning!" said Mr. Sam, hanging up his overcoat with one hand, and
trying to put the bottle in one of the pockets with the other. Mrs. Sam
didn't look at her.

"Good morning, Mrs. Van Alstyne!" Miss Summers almost threw it at her.
"I spoke to you before; I guess you didn't hear me."

"Oh, yes, I heard you," answered Mrs. Sam, and turned her back on her.
Give me a little light-haired woman for sheer devilishness!

I'd expected to see Miss Summers fly to pieces with rage, but she stared
at Mrs. Sam's back, and after a minute she laughed.

"I see!" she remarked slowly. "You're the sister, aren't you?"

Mr. Sam had given up trying to hide the bottle and now he set it on the
floor with a thump and came over to the fire.

"It's--you see, the situation is embarrassing," he began. "If we had had
any idea--"

"I might have been still in the Finleyville hotel!" she finished for
him. "Awful thought, isn't it?"

"Under the circumstances," went on Mr. Sam, nervously, "don't you think
it would be--er--better form if er--under the circumstances--"

"I'm thinking of my circumstances," she put in, good-naturedly. "If you
imagine that six weeks of one-night stands has left me anything but a
rural wardrobe and a box of dog biscuit for Arabella, you're pretty well
mistaken. I haven'