Langham left them after a time and they began to dress for dinner. Usually they had a great deal to say to each other; often they disputed and were gorgeously insolent to each other about the most trifling things, but on the present occasion their one desire was to dress as rapidly as possible and to visit the office upon some pretext or other.

When Colonel Meredith from the engulfment of a starched shirt announced that he had several letters to write and wondered where one could buy postage-stamps, it afforded Bob Jonstone malicious satisfaction to inform him that the "little drawer in their writing-table contained not only plenty of twos but fives and a strip of special deliveries."

"All I have to think about," said he, "is my laundry. I suppose they can tell me at the office."

"They?" exclaimed Colonel Meredith.

As he spoke the collar button sprang like a slippery cherry-stone from between his thumb and forefinger, fell in the exact middle of the room in a perfectly bare place, and disappeared. Up to this moment the cousins had remained on even terms in the race to be dressed first. But now Mr. Jonstone gained and, before the collar button was found, had given a parting "slick" to his hair and gone out.

It was now dark, and the woodland streets of The Camp were lighted by lanterns. Windows were bright-yellow rectangles. A wind had risen and the lake could be heard slapping against the rocky shore.

Maud Darling had left the office long enough to change from tailor-made tweeds to the simplest white muslin. She was adding up a column in a fat book. She looked golden in the firelight and the lamplight, and resembled some heavenly being but for the fact that, for the moment, she was puzzled to discover the sum of seven and five and was biting the end of her pencil. The divine muse of Inspiration lives in the "other" ends of pens and pencils. The world owes many of its masterpieces of literature and invention to reflective nibbling at these instruments, and if I were a teacher I should think twice before I told my pupils to take their pencils out of their mouths.

Mr. Jonstone knocked on the open door of the office.

"This is the office," said Miss Maud Darling; "you don't have to knock. Is anything not right?"

"Everything is absolutely perfect," bowed Mr. Jonstone. "But you are busy. I could come again. I only wanted to ask about sending some things to a laundry."

"You're not supposed to think about that," said Maud. "There is a clothes-bag in the big closet in your bedroom and my sister Eve does the rest."

"Oh, but I couldn't allow—"

"Not with her own hands, of course; she merely oversees the laundry and keeps it up to the mark. But if you like your things to be done in any special way you must see her and explain."

"In my home," said Jonstone, "my old mammy does all the washing and most everything else, and I wouldn't dare to find fault. She would follow me up-stairs and down scolding all the time if I did. You see, though she isn't a slave any more, she's never had any wages, and so she takes it out in privileges and prerogatives."