site person--may I venture to sit beside you?" whispered Sally,
as Constance, in trailing pale gray with bands of violet velvet, a
shimmering cloak of the same hues enveloping her like a mist, took the
place beside her. "This is the singer, not my friend Constance.
I'm--just--a little--afraid of you!"

"Nonsense!" Constance's warm hand caught Sally's beneath the cloak. "You
know I don't like show singing--or anything that goes with it."

"Don't forget your promise--" Josephine called back, as the big car, with
its rainbow-tinted load rolled away.

An answering shout from the porch, accompanied by the waving of several
arms, conveyed assurance.

"What promise?" asked Janet, turning to the others. Being the smallest of
the party she occupied one of the folding seats which enable a roomy
tonneau to hold five people.

"The boys are coming after us--we don't know how. Doesn't that give you
courage to face the evening?" murmured Josephine, and the expression on
Janet's face became decidedly more hopeful.

"But how can they come? They've only your brother's car!" she said in
Josephine's ear.

"Don't know, and don't care. They'll come--and rescue us from our fate."

They felt, during the following hours, that they needed the cheering
prospect of a merry home-going, to enable them to bear the rigours of
the form of entertainment offered them. It was not that the affair
differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not
materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome. Possibly
the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least
conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a
roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless. The handsome
rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were
making heroic efforts to seem gay. Somehow even Janet's brilliant music
stirred only a perfunctory sort of applause.

"Never played so badly in my life," whispered the performer, when she
regained Josephine's side, after her second number.

"You played perfectly, as you always do."

"I played like an automaton--a 'piano-player.' Don't pretend you don't
know the difference."

"I understand, of course. But, you know, we shouldn't really like to
have you play for the bishop and these people as you do for us on your
own piano."

"The poor bishop! Doesn't he look like a martyr? I'm sure he's
delightful--in his own library, or at his