face pale with anger, "you are positively
insufferable. Will you leave my room and close the door after you?"

"Well, Katy has just informed me," said Linda, "that this dinner party
doesn't come off without my valued assistance, and before I agree to
assist, I'll know ONE thing. Are you proposing to entertain these three
men yourself, or have you asked Marian?"

Eileen indicated an open note lying on her dressing table.

"I did not know they were coming until an hour ago," she said. "_I_
barely had time to fill the vases and dust, and then I ran up to dress
so that there would be someone presentable when they arrive."

"All right then, we'll agree that this is a surprise party, but if John
Gilman has told you so much about them, you must have been expecting
them, and in a measure prepared for them at any time. Haven't you talked
it over with Marian, and told her that you would want her when they
came?"

Eileen was extremely busy with another wave of hair. She turned her back
and her voice was not quite steady as she answered. "Ever since Marian
got this 'going to the city to study' idea in her head I have scarcely
seen her. She had an awful job to empty the house, and pack such things
as she wants to keep, and she is working overtime on a very special plan
that she thinks maybe she'll submit in a prize competition offered by
a big firm of San Francisco architects, so I have scarcely seen her for
six weeks."

"And you never once went over to help her with her work, or to encourage
her or to comfort her? You can't think Marian can leave this valley and
not be almost heartbroken," said Linda. "You just make me almost wonder
at you. When you think of the kind of friends that Marian Thorne's
father and mother, and our father and mother were, and how we children
were reared together, and the good times we have had in these two
houses--and then the awful day when the car went over the cliff, and
how Marian clung to us and tried to comfort us, when her own health was
broken--and Marian's the same Marian she has always been, only nicer
every day--how you can sit there and say you have scarcely seen her in
six of the hardest weeks of her life, certainly surprises me. I'll tell
you this: I told Katy I would help her, but I won't do it if you don't
go over and make Marian come tonight."

Eileen turned to her sister and looked at her keenly. Linda's brow was
sullen, and her jaw set.

"A bed would look mighty good to me and