, with reasonable promptitude, in their
train. When, after the front door had closed for the last time, Martin
released a long yawn, she told him to run along to bed; she wanted to
talk with Rodney, who was to spend the night while his own clothes were
drying out in the laundry.

"Good night, old chap," said Martin in accents of lively commiseration,
"I'm glad I'm not in for what you are."

CHAPTER IV

ROSALIND STANTON DOESN'T DISAPPEAR

Rodney found a pipe of his that he kept concealed on the premises,
loaded and lighted it, sat down astride a spindling little chair that
looked hardly up to his weight, settled his elbows comfortably on the
back of it, and then asked his sister what Martin had meant--what was he
in for?

Frederica, curled up in a corner of the sofa, finished her own train of
thought aloud, first.

"She's awfully attractive, don't you think? His wife, I mean. Oh, James
Randolph's, of course." She turned to Rodney, looked at him at first
with a wry pucker between her eyebrows, then with a smile, and finally
answered his question. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, I was going to
scold you, but I'm not."

"Why, yes," he admitted through his smoke. "Randolph's wife's a mighty
pretty woman. But I expect that lets her out, doesn't it?"

Frederica shook her head. "She's a good deal of a person, I should say,
on the strength of to-night's showing. She kept her face perfectly
through the whole thing--didn't try to nag at him or apologize to the
rest of us. I'd like to know what she's saying to him now."

Then, "Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago," she went on. "I'd made
such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a
tip about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way
of yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by
yourself, this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my
plan was silly after all--anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was,
of course, to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff."

He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of
blowing two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at
last, "That was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things
like that? You ought to write romances for the magazines, that's what
you ought to do."

"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in
things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have t