of her way. He telephoned for flowers and
candy for her quite shamelessly, and he got out a book of photographs
that they had taken on their wedding journey, and kept it on the library
table. The sole concession he made to our presumptive relationship was
to bring me the responsibility for everything that went wrong, and his
shirts for buttons.

The first I heard of the trouble was from Dal. He waylaid me in the hall
after dinner that night, and his face was serious.

"I'm afraid we can't keep it up very long, Kit," he said. "With Jim
trailing Bella all over the house, and the old lady keener every day,
it's bound to come out somehow. And that isn't all. Jim and Harbison had
a set-to today--about you."

"About me!" I repeated. "Oh, I dare say I have been falling short again.
What was Jim doing? Abusing me?"

Dal looked cautiously over his shoulder, but no one was near.

"It seems that the gentle Bella has been unusually beastly today to Jim,
and--I believe she's jealous of you, Kit. Jim followed her up to the
roof before dinner with a box of flowers, and she tossed them over the
parapet. She said, I believe, that she didn't want his flowers; he could
buy them for you, and be damned to him, or some lady-like equivalent."

"Jim is a jellyfish," I said contemptuously. "What did he say?"

"He said he only cared for one woman, and that was Bella; that he never
had really cared for you and never would, and that divorce courts were
not unmitigated evils if they showed people the way to real happiness.
Which wouldn't amount to anything if Harbison had not been in the tent,
trying to sleep!"

Dal did not know all the particulars, but it seems that relations
between Jim and Mr. Harbison were rather strained. Bella had left the
roof and Jim and the Harbison man came face to face in the door of the
tent. According to Dal, little had been said, but Jim, bound by his
promise to me, could not explain, and could only stammer something about
being an old friend of Miss Knowles. And Tom had replied shortly that
it was none of his business, but that there were some things friendship
hardly justified, and tried to pass Jim. Jim was instantly enraged; he
blocked the door to the roof and demanded to know what the other man
meant. There were two or three versions of the answer he got. The
general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further,
and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted--when a man
s