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“Hello!” cried Mead, “Miss Perry gone already?”

“She was very tired,” said Patty veraciously, but evasively.

“Awfully jolly girl, isn’t she Mead?” said Hawley, with the expansiveness of the newly-wed. “Handsome, too?”

“Perhaps she is, but so long as she dresses like a veiled prophet it is hard to tell.”

“If you two can get on without me,” said Patty, disregarding a muffled protest from under the table, “I’ll go up and fetch,” she made these comforting words very clear, “my green motor veil.”

Instantly, when he closed the door after her, Mead turned to Hawley.

“There’s something wrong with this confounded mask,” said he. “This strap-thing that goes round my head must be too tight. I’ve been mad with it the last half hour. How do I look?” he asked genially as he took it off, and proceeded to tamper with the buckles and elastic. “Howling Jupiter!” he cried a moment later, “I’ve busted it.”

As the two friends stood and stared at one another aghast, they heard the click of Patty’s returning heels, and Mead, abandoning dignity, courage–everything except the broken mask–dived into Miss Perry’s maiden bower.

Mrs. Hawley watched this procedure with wide and fascinated eyes. No ripple shook the walls of the bower. No sound proceeded from it as the moments flew. Then Patty fell away into helpless laughter and wept tears of shocked and sudden mirth into the now useless motor veil.

“Patty!” remonstrated her husband, but she laughed helplessly on. “At least come out into the hall and laugh there,” he urged, “the poor chap will hear you.” And when he had followed her and listened to her shaken whisper, he broke into such a shout as forced the indignant and outraged Kate into a shudder of protest and disgust.

Instantly Mead threw an arm past the table’s single central support and grasped a handful of silk chiffon and two fingers.

He, being of an acquisitive turn, retained the fingers. She being of a dictatorial turn, rebuked him.

“Finding is keeping,” he shamelessly remarked. “Even in infancy I was taught that.”

Now, a certain pomp of scene and circumstance is necessary to the sort of dignified snubbing with which Miss Perry was accustomed to treat possible admirers. Also, a serene consciousness of superlative good looks. But Kate Perry disfigured, cramped into a ridiculous hiding place, and suffering untold miseries of headache and throbbing eyes, was a very different creature.

And Mead, flippant, hard, and misanthropic in the state of nature, softened wonderfully as he sat in the gloom of the tablecover, in silent possession of those two slim fingers.

His words grew gentle, his manner kind, and her answers were calculated to petrify her long-suffering family if they could have overheard them.

“Mr. Mead,” she said at last, “will you be so very kind as to stay here quietly under the table while I scramble out and go up to my room?”

No tongue of angel could have made a more welcome suggestion. Mead uttered feeble and polite proffers of escort, and silently called down blessings upon the head he had never seen. He had just allowed himself to be dissuaded from knight errantry, when the door opened and Jimmie flashed his dark lantern about the brightly lighted room. He then beckoned mysteriously to the still vigilant Horace, who lurked in the hall.

“Have you found them?” whispered that youth.

“Not a trace of them,” answered Jimmie triumphantly. “They ain’t gone out. They ain’t in their rooms, and I’m studyin’ how I can round ’em up. They’re the most suspicious characters I ever see, Horace, and this night’s work may cost us our lives.”

This disposition of his existence did not seem to cheer Horace.

“Counterfeiters,” Jimmie went on, “is the desperatest kind of criminals there is. Still we got to git ’em. I’ll look round this room just so as nothing won’t escape us, and then we’ll go up to the next floor. It’s good we got two of them located in the bridal suite.”

Jimmie, with his prying dark lantern and his prodding nightstick, soon reached the space under the table, and the counterfeiters secreted there.

“I got ’em,” he cried delightedly. “Hi, you. Come out of there and show yourselves.”

They came. There was nothing else to do.

“Moses’s holy aunt,” cried Jimmie, falling back upon Horace, who promptly fell back upon the sofa.

“Here, you,” said Mead. “You get out of this, both of you. Don’t you know this is a private sitting-room?”

“No settin’-room,” said Jimmie, recovering somewhat, “is private to them as sets under tables blackening one another’s eyes.”

“You ridiculous idiot,” snorted Mead. “Do you dare to think that I hurt this lady?”

“Lady? Ain’t she your wife?”

“She is not,” snapped Kate.

“Then why did you hit her?” demanded Jimmie. “If she ain’t your wife what did you want to hit her for? An’ anyway, she’d ought to be. That’s all I got to say.”

* * * * *

The same idea occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Hawley, crouched guiltily against their door to hear their victims pass, for their amazed ears caught these words–the first were Kate’s:

“You must let me give you some of my lotion.”

And then came Mead’s:

“I shall be most grateful. It must be hot stuff. You know you’re hardly disfigured at all.”

“The saints forgive him,” Patty gurgled.

Later on in the darkness, Jimmie’s idea visited Mead and was received with some cordiality. And at some time later still, it must have been presented to Miss Perry, for the misanthropic Mead–no longer misanthropic–now boasts a massive and handsome wife whom he calls his Little Kitty. But the idea was originally Jimmie’s.