there, helpless. They had him!

The cart drew up beside steps leading to a wide porch shaded by a
striped awning.

"Home at last," cooed Miss Juliana with false welcome.

A loutish person promptly abandoned a lawn mower in the near distance
and came to stand by the head of the languid pony. He grinned horribly,
and winked as the two figures descended from the rear of the cart. For a
moment, halting on the first of the steps, the Wilbur twin became aware
that just beyond him, almost to be grasped, was a veritable rainbow
curved above a whirling lawn sprinkler. And he had learned that a
rainbow is a thing of gracious promise. But probably they have to be
natural rainbows; probably you don't get anything out of one you make
yourself. Even as he looked, the shining omen vanished, somewhere shut
off by an unseen power.

"This way, please," called Miss Juliana, cordially, and he followed her
guiltily up the steps to the shaded porch.

The girl had preceded her. The Merle twin lingered back of them,
shocked, austere, deprecating, and yet somehow bland withal, as if these
little affairs were not without their compensating features.

The bowed Wilbur twin was startled by a gusty torrent of laughter. With
torturing effort, he raised his eyes to a couple of elderly male
Whipples. One sat erect on a cushioned bench, and one had lain at ease
in a long, low thing of wicker. It was this one who made the ill-timed
and tasteless demonstration that was still continuing. Ultimately the
creature lost all tone from his laughter. It went on, soundless but
uncannily poignant. Such was the effect that the Wilbur twin wondered if
his own ears had been suddenly deafened. This Whipple continued to shake
silently. The other, who had not laughed, whose face seemed ill-modelled
for laughing, nevertheless turned sparkling eyes from under shelving
brows upon Juliana and said in words stressed with emotion: "My dear,
you have brightened my whole day."

The first Whipple, now recovered from his unseemly paroxysm, sat erect
to study the newcomers in detail. He was a short, round-chested man with
a round moon face marked by heavy brows like those of the other. He had
fat wrists and stout, blunt fingers. With a stubby thumb he now pushed
up the outer ends of the heavy brows as if to heighten the power of his
vision for this cherished spectacle.

"I seem to recognize the lad," he murmured as if in privacy to his own
hairy ears. "Surely I've seen th