the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?" he demanded as he joined me at the
little wicker table.

"I've had some rather disturbing news," I told him, wondering just how
to begin.

"The kiddies?" he asked, stopping short.

I stared at him closely as I shook my head in answer to that question.
He looked leaner and frailer and less robustious than of old. But in
my heart of hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless and
unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal instinct of mine which
took wayward joy in mothering what it couldn't master. It had brought
him a little closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was perhaps
to be only something of the moment.

"Dinky-Dunk," I told him as quietly as I could, "I want you to go down
to San Diego and see Lady Allie."

It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one that came into his
eyes.

"Why?" he asked as he slowly seated himself across the table from me.

"Because I think she needs you," I found the courage to tell him.

"Why?" he asked still again.

"There has been an accident," I told him.

"What sort of accident?" he quickly inquired, with one hand arrested
as he went to shake out his table-napkin.

"It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie's been hurt."

"Badly?" he asked, as our glances met.

"Not badly, in one way," I explained to him. "She's not in any danger,
I mean. But her plane caught fire, and she's been burned about the
face."

His lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. And slowly up into
his colorless face crept a blighted look, a look which brought a vague
yet vast unhappiness to me as I sat contemplating it.

"Do you mean she's disfigured," he asked, "that it's something she'll
always--"

"I'm afraid so," I said, when he did not finish his sentence.

He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long time.

"And you want me to go?" he finally said.

"Yes," I told him.

He was silent for still another ponderable space of time.

"But do you understand--" he began. And for the second time he didn't
finish his sentence.

"I understand," I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his
inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.

"All right," he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless
tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as
being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he
would go.

_Sunday the Third