Mr. Sam got his voice first.
"B--bad night for a walk," he said.
"Frightful!" she said. "I've been buried to my knees. May I sit down?"
To those of us who knew, her easy manner had something horrible in it.
"Sorry there are no chairs, Julia," Mr. Pierce said. "Sit on the cot,
won't you?"
"Who IS it?" Mrs. Dick asked from, as you may say, her eclipse. She and
Miss Summers were the only calm ones in the room.
"I--I don't know," Mr. Dick stammered, but the next moment Miss Julia,
from the cot, looked across at him and grinned.
"Well, Dicky!" she said. "Who'd have thought it!"
"You said you didn't know her!" his wife said from behind him.
"Who'd have thought wha--what?" he asked with bravado.
"All this!" Miss Julia waved her hand around the room, with its bare
walls, and blankets over the windows to keep the light in and the cold
out, and the circle of us sitting around on sand boxes from the links
and lawn rollers. "To find you here, all snug in your own home, with
your household gods and a wife." Nobody could think of anything to say.
"That is," she went on, "I believe there is a wife. Good heavens, Dicky,
it isn't Minnie?"
He stepped aside at that, disclosing Mrs. Dick on her box, with her
childish eyes wide open.
"There--there IS a wife, Julia," he said. "This is her--she."
Well, she'd come out to make mischief--it was written all over her when
she came in the door, but when Mr. Dick presented his wife, frightened
as he was and still proud of her, and Mrs.
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