luded every feminine convenience anyway. But when I
build my house I am going to build it for myself."

"Then don't talk any more about being my bug-catcher," said Linda
promptly, "because when I build my house it's going to be a nest that
will hold six at the very least. My heart is perfectly set on a brood of
six."

Linda was quite unaware that the two men were studying her closely, but
if she had known what was going on in their minds she would have had
nothing to regret, because both of them found her very attractive, and
both of them were wondering how anything so superficial as Eileen could
be of the same blood as Linda.

"Are we keeping you too late?" inquired Peter.

"No," said Linda, "I am as interested as I can be. Finish everything you
want to do before we go. I hope you're going to let me come over often
and watch you with your building. Maybe I can get an idea for some
things I want to do. Eileen and I have our house divided by a Mason and
Dixon line. On her side is Mother's suite, the dining room, the living
room and the front door. On mine there's the garage and the kitchen and
Katy's bedroom and mine and the library and the billiard room. At
the present minute I am interested in adapting the library to my
requirements instead of Father's, and I am emptying the billiard room
and furnishing it to make a workroom. I have a small talent with a brush
and pencil, and I need some bare walls to tack my prints on to dry, and
I need numerous places for all the things I am always dragging in from
the desert and the canyons; and since I have the Bear Cat running,
what I have been doing in that line with a knapsack won't be worthy of
mention."

"How did it come," inquired Henry Anderson, "that you had that car
jacked up so long?"

"Why, hasn't anybody told you," asked Linda, "about our day of the Black
Shadow?"

"John Gilman wrote me when it happened," said Peter softly, "but I don't
believe it has been mentioned before Henry. You tell him."

Linda turned to Henry Anderson, and with trembling lips and paling
cheeks, in a few brief sentences she gave him the details. Then she
said to Peter Morrison in a low voice: "And that is the why of Marian
Thorne's white head. Anybody tell you that?"

"That white head puzzled me beyond anything I ever saw," he said. "I
meant to ask John about it. He used to talk to me and write to me often
about her, and lately he hasn't; when I came I saw the reason, and so
you see I