at the lodge gate of the great Vandyne home out on
the Island. He, too, treated Peter like a sick baby. I never was so
puzzled; and dinner would have seemed long but for the fact that they
all wanted to hear so much about Sam and The Briers and the whole
Harpeth Valley. I never more enjoyed telling anything, and even Peter's
gloom lightened when I told him about the fat little duck the Byrd had
insisted on sending him--alive in a box. Daddy was secretly expressing
it to me, on the sleeping-car porter's kindly advice, when he saw it in
my baggage.

"Well, well," said Judge Vandyne, as he came into the drawing-room with
us after dinner, "young Crittenden is really getting to goal on that
farm question. I'm glad you sent me that report--it set some big things
in motion. I'll tell you about it when I get you alone," he added, under
his breath. And that was another time that made me feel as if I were a
baby that ought to be sliced up to be divided. As it was, Peter got me
first, and I don't blame him for being in agony. That is, I didn't blame
Peter, but neither do I blame Farrington, now that I have talked to him.
This was Peter's tale of woe:

"Stolen, it is absolutely stolen from me, Betty, and I am helpless to
protect the child of my brain," he began. The judge and Mabel had at
last left us alone, probably because they hesitated to have Peter commit
patricide and fratricide, if those are the right terms for sister and
father murder.

"How, Peter?" I asked, taking his hand with deep sympathy.

"Betty, since the first three rehearsals I am not allowed even in the
theater, and Farrington is a brute. I do not know what he is doing to my
play, but I do know that he was at work on a horrible laugh in the first
part of the first act that I did not intend at all. The leading woman
is coarse, with no soul, and the star is a great hulking ass. I am wild
and nobody sympathizes with me. Father has talked to Farrington, and
that is why he wired to you. Oh, I know he wired or you wouldn't have
come up to this inferno at this time of the year. That is one kindness
he did me--it _is_ a comfort to me--oh, Betty." And Peter put his head
down on my arm that was next him and sobbed, as the Byrd does when
anything happens to one of his "little ones."

I didn't blame Peter at all, for that play was his "little one" and his
first. I just took it out in hating and vilifying Farrington, until I
got Peter much comforted, even interested in h