floor-full of well-dressed
maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as solid as granite went to
pieces like sand castles.

Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that
he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and,
spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who
had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real
existence--this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had
before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the
present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.

None of them said anything in particular until the mixture in the
glasses had sunk about half-way down. Then Mr. Piper remarked in a
pleasant voice, "I don't often permit myself--seldom even before the
country adopted prohibition--but the present circumstances seem to
be--er--unusual enough--to warrant--" smiled cheerfully and lifted his
glass again. When he had set it down he looked at Mrs. Severance, then
at Oliver, and then started to speak.

Oliver listened with some tenseness, knowing only that whatever he might
possibly have imagined might happen, what would happen, to judge from
the previous events of the evening, would be undoubtedly so entirely
different that prophecy was no use at all. But, even so, he was not
entirely prepared for the unexpectedness of Mr. Piper's first sentence.

"I feel that I owe you very considerable apologies, Oliver," the
President of the Commercial began with a good deal of stateliness. "In
fact I really owe you so many that it leaves me at rather a loss 'as to
just how to begin." He smiled a little shyly.

"Rose has explained everything," he said, and Oliver looked at Mrs.
Severance with stupefied wonder--_how?_

"But even so, there remains the difficulty--of my putting myself into
words."

"Silly boy," said Mrs. Severance easily, and Oliver noted with fresh
amazement that the term seemed to come from her as naturally and almost
conventionally as if she had every legal American right to use it. "Let
me, dear." And Oliver felt his head begin to go round like a pinwheel.

But then--but she really _couldn't_ be married to Mr. Piper--and yet
somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had
been--Oliver's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the
proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to
Mohammedanism together and he looked at Mr. Piper's gre