dinner was two-thirds
through, and then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose explanation
about some tractor-work keeping him late didn't quite ring true. His
harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me
at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.

I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met role, but it
struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his
garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a
hawk.

"I'm too old a dog," I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, "ever to be
surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a
skeleton."

I don't know what prompted that statement, but it had the effect of
making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.

"I think you English people," I heard him telling her a little later,
"have a tendency to carry moderation to excess."

"I don't quite understand that," she said, lighting what must have
been about her seventeenth cigarette.

"I mean you're all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter--which
impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie,
worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian
milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a
fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him,
"Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye:
"Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James."

But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had
rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and
airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars
of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from
Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to
remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those
devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me
an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality
presented itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he'd take us back in
the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going
spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of
putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted
Peter meekly in the back seat with little Dinkie to hold and took the
reins myself.

I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart,
feeling it really wasn't