een hers. "Some one who had your signature to copy."

She nodded, whitely, in horror. Joe folded the paper and tucked it
into a pocket.

"We can touch nobody," he averred regretfully, "unless we catch
Harrigan!"

Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she
giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to
increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet. The ground
persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to
Caleb's arm. And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate. But
at the sight of her father, sunk in silence Upon his desk in the ground
floor "office," she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb's arm and
went swiftly across to him.

"Barbara," he beseeched her brokenly, the moment her cheek touched his.
"You mustn't believe that I----"

She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips.

"I have been a very foolish and hysterical child," she said. "I'll try
to behave more like a woman now. And you and Uncle Cal have been
only--absurd!"

She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed
upstairs; but her head seemed steady enough. It was only after she had
reached her own room that she complained querrulously of the failing
lights. Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed.

On the floor below, her father had turned again to his desk, his head
bowed upon his arms. And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter
Allison when a hand touched, awkwardly, his shoulder. He looked up
heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter. Caleb stuttered
furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him. Then a happy
thought showed the way.

"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he
made of it a ceremonial. "Do you think you would--care to join me,
sir?"

They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common
tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity. Dexter came to his feet;
he reached out and crushed the other man's hand within his soft, white
fingers. Nor was his reply quite according to formula.

"I don't mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank God . . . I
don't mind if I do!"

Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house. And they kept
close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that
followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such
companionship.

Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay