r of us is sorry you came, and I hope you'll never be sorry
you went."

That was her nearest approach to an affectionate farewell. Rose managed
to express her affection and gratitude a little more adequately, but not
much. "It isn't the end of us, you know," she concluded. "You're coming
to see me in New York."

Miss Gibbons smiled with good-humored skepticism at that.

Rose telegraphed Galbraith that morning, and she took the noon train for
St. Louis. She needed a day or two there to make the modest supplements
to her wardrobe that her savings permitted.

BOOK FOUR

The Real Adventure

CHAPTER I

THE TUNE CHANGES

John Williamson's doctor packed him off to Carlsbad just about the time
that Rose achieved the conquest of Centropolis (along in April, 1914,
that was). Violet and their one child, a girl of twelve, went along with
him to keep him company; at rather long range, it seemed, because they
were both in Paris on the first of August, when the war broke out, and
John spent six frantic days getting into Switzerland and out again into
France, before his attempt to join them was successful. They had run the
full gamut of refugees' experiences, by the time they got to England and
secured accommodations on a liner to New York, and the tale got an added
touch from the stratagem Violet employed in successfully bringing off
all her new French frocks.

It took just two hours' steady talking to tell the story, and Violet
figured that during the first week after her return to Chicago, she told
it on an average of three times a day. So that by the time she could
manage a day for motoring out to Lake Forest to see Constance Crawford,
she was ready to talk about something else.

Constance had lately had her fourth--and she asserted, last--baby, and
wasn't seeing anybody yet, except intimates, one at a time; and she
relaxed a little deeper, with a sigh of relief, into her cushioned
chair, when Violet said:

"The same things happened to us that happened to everybody else, so you
don't have to hear them. Oh, it was nice, in a way, being separated from
poor John when the thing happened, because--well, he hasn't got over it
yet. He's still more as he was when we were first engaged, than he's
ever been since. And at thirty-seven that's something! And then it's a
satisfaction about the clothes. It seems as if I must have had a
premonition that something was going to happen, because I bought
absolutely everyth