Chef laughed a loud, scornful, defiant, gesticulant, Gallic laugh. His good-natured features focussed into a scathing Parisian sneer; he turned a delicate omelette over in the air and said, "Lala!"

"There are," continued Mr. Langham, "only half a dozen women in the world who can compare in looks with you and your sisters. There's the Princess Oducalchi—your mother. There's the Countess of Kingston, Mrs. Waring, Miss Virginia Clark—but these merely compare. They don't compete."

Mr. Langham tried to look very sly and wicked, and he sang in a humming voice: "Oh, to be a Mussulman, now that spring is here."

"Coffee?" said Mary.

"Please."

"Well," said she, as she poured, "the whys and wherefores don't matter. It's to be a bachelor resort—that seems definitely settled. But I think we had better send the triplets away. I don't want the Pritchard and Herring episodes repeated while my nerves are in this present state. And there's Lee—if she isn't leading Renier into one folly after another, I don't know what she is doing. They seem to think that keeping an inn is a mere excuse for flirtation."

"Don't send them away," said Langham. "If you sent those three girls to a place where there weren't any men at all—they'd flirt with their shadows. Better have 'em flirting where you can watch 'em than where you can't. And besides—are you quite sure that the Pritchard and Herring episodes were mere flirtations? Day before yesterday I came upon Miss Gay by accident; she was practising casting."

"That's how she spends half her time."

"But she was practising with Pritchard's rod! Yesterday I came upon her in the same place—"

"By accident?" smiled Mary.

"By design," he said honestly. "And this time she wasn't casting. She had the rod lying across her knees, and her eyes were turned dreamily toward the bluest and most distant mountain-top."

"'Why do you look at that mountain?' I said.

"'Because it's blue, too,' said she.

"'And what makes you blue?' I asked.

"'The same cause that makes the mountain blue,' said she.

"'Hum,' said I. 'Then it must be distance.'

"'Something like that,' she said. 'I sometimes think I'm the most distant person in the world.'

"'You're probably not the only person who thinks that!' said I.

"And she said, 'No? Really?' And that was all I could get out of her. Except that, just as I was walking away, I heard a sharp whistling sound and my cap—my new plaid cap—was suddenly tweaked from the top of my head and hung in a tree. She must have practised a lot with that rod of Pritchard's. It was a beautiful cast—"

"She might have put your eye out!" exclaimed Mary.

"She hung the apple of my eye in a tree," said he dolefully. "You know that one with the green and brown? And last night it rained."

"I hope she expressed sorrow," said Mary.

"She was going to, but I got laughing and then she did."

"What a dear you are!" exclaimed Mary. "And so you think she's making herself mournful over Mr. Pritchard? And what are the reasons for thinking that Phyllis is serious about Mr. Herring?"