ing I wanted.

"Of course it was an awful moment when John said we couldn't take
anything but hand-luggage. But I got three perfectly enormous
straw-telescopes--you know the kind--about four feet long, and then we
left everything else behind, except a tooth-brush and a comb apiece. And
what with that and the biggest hat box in the world--my, but it's lucky
hats are small!--we managed it.

"But all the stuff about having your automobile taken away and riding in
a cart, and thinking you're going to be arrested as a spy, and living
for days on milk-chocolate and _vin ordinaire_, you've heard it all a
hundred times already, so we'll talk about something else."

"I never heard anything so heroic in my life," Constance said. "But you
don't need to be, because I'm perishing for details.--Unless," she went
on, "it isn't heroism at all, but something else you want to talk
about."

"Just my luck!" said Violet. "I thought I was going to get away with
that. There _is_ something I'm frantic with curiosity about, and you're
the first person I've seen I could ask. I spent two hours trying to get
up my courage with Frederica, but I couldn't. Do you know anything about
them--Rose and Rodney? Does any one know anything about her since she
disappeared from the Globe?"

"Why, I fancy _they_ do," said Constance, "Rodney and Frederica. I don't
know just why I think so. Frank sees Rodney every day or two at lunch
time at the club; says he seems all right. He's working terribly hard.
And the money he's making! Frank says he's a regular robber in the fees
he asks--and gets. He says he speaks of Rose once in a while, and
not--at least not exactly, as if she were dead. You know what I mean!
Just in that maddening, matter-of-course way, as if everybody knew all
about her.

"Frederica won't talk about her at all. I mean, she won't start the
subject, and nobody has the nerve to start it with her. Freddy can be
like that, you know. She'd make a perfectly wonderful queen--did you
ever think of that? Of England. Harriet's the only one who'd talk, and
of course she's gone back. You knew that, didn't you? Oh, but naturally,
since you've talked to Freddy."

Violet nodded. "It all sounded so exactly like Harriet," she said, "as
Freddy told about it. No confidences, no flutters. She didn't even seem
interested until the day England went in. And then at lunch that day,
she said to Frederica, 'I've just cabled Tony that I'm coming back on
the next bo