ought the
rest of the glass, and--somebody was coming through, feet first. It was
Jim.

He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped in a bundle of red
and yellow silk comfort that proved to be Aunt Selina, also feet first.
I had a glimpse of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters.
Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt Selina's legs so
that she could walk, offered his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs,
without a word!

None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and went upstairs and took
off our wraps and went to bed. It had been almost a fiasco.

Chapter XV. SUSPICION AND DISCORD

Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her
feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all
morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he
watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out
of the house.

When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going
to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen
to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited
together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was
somewhat ruffled.

"He wouldn't open the door," he reported, "and when I told him it was
meal time, he said he wasn't hungry, and he didn't give a whoop about
the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn't proposed to
adopt us."

So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o'clock Jim came
downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella
had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never
seen to speak to him unnecessarily.

The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms
of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne's pearls, using them,
the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace
or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and
stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner
on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with
a copy of Poe's Purloined Letter and Gaboriau's Monsieur LeCoq. He went
through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and
lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next
day, the fourth, he found something--not much, but it was curious. He
had been in the studio, poking around behind th