People acknowledge their mental panics so divergently. My Husband acknowledged his by ramming his elbow into his coffee cup. Claude Kennilworth lit one cigarette after another. The May Girl started to butter a picture post card that someone had just passed her. Quite starkly before my very eyes I saw the Sober Stranger, erstwhile drunken, reach out and slip a silver salt-shaker into his pocket. Meeting his glance my own nerves exploded in a single hoot of mirth.

Into the unhappy havoc of the Stranger's face a rather sick but very determinate little smile shot suddenly.

"Well, I certainly am rattled?" he acknowledged.

His embarrassment was absolutely perfect. Not a whit too much, not a whit too little, at a moment when the slightest under-emphasis or over-emphasis of his awkwardness would have stamped him ineradicably as either boor—or bounder. More indeed by his chair's volition than by his own he seemed to jerk aside then and there from any further responsibility for the incident. Turbid as the storm at the window his eyes racked back to the eyes of his companions.

"Surely," he besought us, "there must be some place—some hotel—somewhere in this town where I can crawl into for a day or two till I can yank myself together again? . . . Taking me in this way from the streets—or worse the way you- people have—" Along the stricken pallor of his forehead a glisten of sweat showed faintly. From my eyes to my Husband's eyes, and back to mine again he turned with a sharply impulsive gesture of appeal. "How do you-people know but what I am a burglar?" he demanded.

"Even so," I suggested blithely, "can't you see that we'd infinitely rather have you visiting here as our friend than boarding at the hotel as our foe!"

The mirthless smile on the Stranger's face twitched ever so faintly at one corner.

"You really believe then—" he quickened, "that there is 'honor among thieves'?"

"All proverbs," intercepted my Husband a bit abruptly, "are best proved by their antithesis. We do at least know that there is at times—a considerable streak of dishonor among saints!"

"Eh?—What's that—I didn't quite catch it," beamed the Bridegroom.

But my Husband's entire attention seemed focused rather suddenly on the Stranger.

"So you'd much better stay right on here where you are!" he adjured him with some accent of authority. "Where all explanations are already given and taken! . . . Ourselves quite opportunely short one guest and long one guest-room, and—No! I won't listen for a moment to its being called an 'imposition'!" protested my Husband. "Not for a moment! Only, of course, I must admit," he confided genially, above the flare of a fresh cigarette, "that it would be a slight convenience to know your name."

"My name?" flushed the Stranger. "Why, of course! It's Allan John."

"You mean 'John Allan'," corrected the May Girl very softly.

"No," insisted the Stranger. "It's Allan John." Quite logically he began to rummage through his pockets for the proof. "It's written on my bill-folder," he frowned. "It's in my check-book. . . . It's written on no-end of envelopes." With his face the color of half-dead sedge grass he sank back suddenly into his chair and turned his empty hands limply outward as though his wrist-bones had been wrung. "Gone!" he gasped. "Stripped!—Everything!"

"There you have it!" I babbled hysterically. "Now, how do you know but what we are burglars? . . . This whole house a Den of Thieves? . . . The impeccable Mr. George Keets there at your right,—no more, no less, than exactly what he looks,— an almost perfect replica of a stage 'Raffles'?"

"Eh? What's that?" bridled George Keets.

"Dragging you here to this house the way we did," I floundered desperately. "Quite helpless as you were. So— so——"

"'Spifflicated,'" prompted the May Girl. The word on her lips was like the flutter of a rose petal.

With a little gasp of astonishment young Kennilworth rose from his place, and dragging his chair in one hand, his plate of fruit in the other, moved round to the May Girl's elbow to finish his breakfast. Like a palm trying to patronize a pine tree, his crisp exotic young ego swept down across her young serenity.

"Really, I don't quite make you out," he said. "I think I shall have to study you!"

"Study—me!" reflected the May Girl. "Make a lesson about me, you mean! On a holiday?" The vaguely dawning dimple in her smooth cheek faded suddenly out again.

The Stranger—Allan John—it seemed, was rising from the table.

"If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go to my room," he explained. "I'm still pretty shaky. I'm——"

But half way to the stairs, as though drawn by some irresistible impulse, he turned, and fumbling his way back across the dining-room opened the big glass doors direct into the storm. Tripping ever so slightly on the threshold he lurched forward in a single wavering step. In an instant the May Girl was at his side, her steadying hand held out to his! Recovering his balance almost instantly he did not however release her hand, but still holding tight to it, indescribably puzzled, indescribably helpless, stood shoulder to shoulder with her, staring out into the tempestuous scene. Lashed by the wind the May Girl's mop of hair blew gold, blew gray, across his rain-drenched eyes. Blurred in a gusty flutter of white skirts his whole tragic, sagging figure loomed suddenly like some weird, symbolic shadow against the girl's bright beauty.

Frankly the picture startled me! "S-s-h!" warned my Husband. "It won't hurt her any! He doesn't even know whether she's young or old."

"Or a boy—or a girl," interposed George Keets, a bit drily.

"Or an imp or a saint," grinned young Kennilworth. "Or——"

"Or anything at all," persisted my Husband, "except that she says 'Kindness' and nothing else, you notice, except just 'Kindness.' No suggestions, you observe? No advice? And at an acid moment in his life of such unprecedented shock and general nervous disorganization when his only conceivable chance of 'come-back' perhaps, hangs on the alkaline wag of a strange dog's tail or the tune of a street piano proving balm not blister. By to-morrow—I think—you won't see him holding hands with the May Girl nor with any other woman. Personally," confided my Husband a bit abruptly, "I rather like the fellow! Even in the worst of his plight last night there was a certain fundamental sort of poise and dignity about him as of one who would say, 'Bad as this is, you chaps must see that I'd stand ready with my life to do the same for you'!"

"To—do—the same—for you?" gasped the Bride. Very quietly, like an offended young princess, she rose from the table and stood for that single protesting moment with her hand on her Bridegroom's shoulder. Her eager, academic young face was frankly aghast,—her voice distinctly strained. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I quite fail to see how the word 'dignity' could possibly be applied to any man who had so debased himself as to go and get drunk because his wife and child were dead!"

"You talk," said my Husband, "as though you thought 'getting drunk' was some sort of jocular sport. It isn't! That is, not inevitably, you know!"

"No—I didn't—know," murmured the Bride coldly.

"Deplorable as the result proved to be," interposed George Keets's smooth, carefully modulated voice, "it's hardly probable I suppose that the poor devil started out with the one deliberate purpose of—of debasing him self, as Mrs. Brenswick calls it."

"N-o?" questioned the Bride.

"It isn't exactly, you mean, as though he'd leapt from the church shouting, 'Yo—ho—, and a bottle of rum,'" observed young Kennilworth with one faintly-twisted eyebrow.

"S-s-h!" admonished everybody.

"Maybe he simply hadn't eaten for days," suggested my Husband.

"Or slept for nights and nights," frowned George Keets.

"And just absolutely was obliged to have a bracer,"