s on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me
into the conclave.

"What do you think, Melhuish?" he asked, and then they all turned to me as
if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old
Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.

"There is so little real evidence, at present," I said, feeling their need
for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.

"It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have--run away
with that man," Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that
produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.

"She's under age, too," Frank put in.

"Does that mean they can't get married?" asked Ronnie.

"Not legally," Frank said.

"It's such madness, such utter madness," his mother broke out in a tone
between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and
came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw
that still floated in this drowning world. "But, as Mr. Melhuish says,"
she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, "we really have very little
evidence, as yet."

"It has occurred to me to wonder," I tried, "whether Miss Jervaise might
not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight..." I
was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse
would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further
argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had
suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to
accommodate all the family--with the one exception of Frank, who, as it
were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested
it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the
effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the
general acclamation.

"Oh! of _course_! So she may!" Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.

"Well, we might have thought of that, certainly," Olive echoed. "It would
be so _like_ Brenda."

While Ronnie hopefully murmured "That _is_ possible, quite possible," as a
kind of running accompaniment.

Then Mr. Jervaise began to draw in to the family group, with what seemed
to me quite an absurd air of meaning to find a place on the raft of the
big rug by the fireplace. Indeed, they had all moved a little closer
together. Only Frank maintained his depressing air of doubt.

"Been an infernally long