LITMIR.BIZ

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very attractive, with thick gray hair and black eyes that seem to snap when he cocks his head down to look up sideways at you. It was a bullet in the neck at the Argonne that makes him have to cock his head before he can turn it. It’s rather effective. And he’s short and rather plump, with nothing in the least machine-gunnish about him—except possibly the sparkle in those keen black eyes.

      “Stupid of me,” he said, looking at me with a sort of amused calculation. “You know, I should have thought you did notice . . . Mrs. Gould and Dikranov, I mean. Anyway, she wasn’t making much time with him while you and Miss Bishop were out. She’s concentrating on George Barrol.”

      “George must be delighted.”

      “And a little nonplused, I should say. He seems to be a pleasant middle-of-the-road sort of chap.”

      Sergeant Buck appeared in the doorway.

      “Well, I see I must go dress,” the Colonel said. “You’re going to the Chetwynds’, and to the dance, of course?”

      “Yes, indeed. It’s Sail Cup Night. Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon is coming down from Philadelphia.”

      Sergeant Buck’s iron face looked at me over the Colonel’s head. I’m afraid I flushed quite guiltily in spite of myself.

      But Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon broke down fifteen miles this side of Wilmington on the Du Pont Highway and didn’t show up at April Harbor till eleven o’clock. Normally that wouldn’t have been of any particular importance, and it wasn’t now, actually, except that it left Sandra Gould at loose ends a bit too long.

      I think we all knew we were in for trouble—all of us in our little crowd, that is. But just what horrible trouble, I don’t suppose any of us—not even Colonel Primrose, who turned out to be pretty well used to that sort of thing—even vaguely or remotely dreamed. We did, as I say, know that something would happen. If we’d been set in a circle and given a pencil and paper, and told it was a new parlor game and to guess what any three people in the room were going to do that night, I’d have written down

      1. Jim Gould was either going to stay home and get stinko drunk, or come here and do it.

      2. Sandra was going to raise as much hell as she could. And

      3. Rosemary was going to come and be beautifully cool and sickeningly well-bred and ignore the whole wretched business.

      Which showed how much I knew about it.

      In the first place, Jim came, and so far as I know didn’t touch a drop of liquor there the whole evening. A lot of us would have been happier the next day if he had. He wasn’t cheerful, and he did act like a man with a terrible load on his mind, but nobody could blame him for that. He had one, in the shape of a wife who had never looked lovelier, or more like the female of the species, in all her life.

      Outwardly Sandra was gentle and outrageously demure in a filmy sea-green chiffon frock with its little cape tied with long narrow grosgrain ribbons at the throat. It wasn’t till you got close to her that you saw the suppressed excitement in the glowing depths of her dark eyes.

      Rosemary, on the other hand, was definitely herself. She still looked like something pretty unattainable, however, with her dull gold hair parted in the middle and a thick coronet braid making a lovely sophisticated halo round her exquisitely shaped head. She had on a deceptively simple pink linen evening frock with a bunch of blue velvet flowers—one of those things that had Paris and New York written all over it and probably cost more than any six other gowns in the room. Beside her Paul Dikranov stood, courteously but definitely possessive, with the air of a man who would allow his property so much rope and not an inch more. There wasn’t anything objectionable about it, however. In fact it was rather comforting in a way to have him there to be reckoned with.

      But chiefly it was the lovely way he ignored Sandra that was noticeable. He talked to Mrs. Gould, he was positively charming to Lucy Lee, and I suppose he would have been to me too if Colonel Primrose hadn’t sort of adopted me—Sergeant Buck not being there—to look after him.

      People were standing about mopping their brows, waiting for something to do. The shower had been too short-lived to clear the air at all, and flashes of heat lightning, and the rumbling thunder still over the bay, made the hot sticky night seem closing ominously in on us.

      Colonel Primrose, Mr. Bishop and I were standing in the window; Sandra, Jim, Andy and George Barrol were across the big room by the silver catboat, the presentation of which would be the high point of the evening. Sandra and Andy were receiving congratulations from people coming up, and George was sort of hanging about the offing saying, “Isn’t she marvelous!” “Lovely child!” and what not.

      They were having some kind of argument about sailsmanship, as Andy calls it, then. Lucy Lee, Paul Dikranov, Rosemary and some other people were playing monopoly. Mrs. Gould and the Chetwynds were talking to Dr. Potter, who’d put on a fresh linen suit and dropped in for his evening highball. It was just the ordinary sort of Saturday evening that you’d find in any country yacht club in America. Nothing on the surface suggested—or would have suggested to an outsider —that the room was packed with dynamite. Certainly not that the coolest, most detached person in the room was the detonating element.

      Suddenly the argument in front of the model catboat broke into the loud “You can’t possibly!”—“I can so!” stage. Everybody looked around, rather more amused and interested than surprised, for a moment. But only for a moment. There was something definitely alarming in the abrupt tenseness that was instantly apparent.

      Sandra was facing her husband and Andy and the others. George Barrol was behind her looking a bit fidgety.

      “I can so! Eef she could do eet!” she cried. “I show you! Andy will come with me!”

      Lucy Lee’s dark curly head went up with a jerk.

      “Don’t let him go, Jim!” she cried. Then she tried to laugh, her face quite white.

      “Go where?” Rosemary asked.

      “It’s that old business. . . . Sandra wants to sail out to the lightship—in a storm—just because you did. It’s crazy!”

      Rosemary’s eyes moved across the room and met Jim’s, I imagine in the longest glance they’d yet exchanged. They were both remembering the night they’d gone out on a dare and almost never come back.

      “But I will go!”

      Sandra came across the room, head up, eyes flashing.

      “Or maybe . . . your Paul will go weeth me!”

      She stopped by Dikranov’s chair, her hands resting lightly on her hips . . . rather more like the dancing Carmen than an intrepid young sportswoman.

      “Just for old times’ sake—hein?”

      Her dark head tossed wickedly.

      “But maybe you try to forget! Ah, naughty Paul!”

      She shook her scarlet-tipped finger at him.

      Paul Dikranov’s face was as expressionless—in its own different way—as Sergeant Buck’s. Rosemary stared at them both, her own face a pale mask, ivory-hard suddenly. Sandra made a quick pirouette away from them, like a dancer on a cabaret floor, and came to a stop in front of her husband.

      “Ah, my Jeem! You theenk I don’t know how much you don’t like me tonight . . . but I weel show you!”

      Jim’s jaw tightened. He reached out to take her by the arm, but she eluded him with the grace of an apache. He couldn’t very well chase her across the room with fifty people watching. So he took a deep breath and just stood there.

      Sandra had whirled across to poor George Barrol and had him by the arm.

      “You weel come with me, George! They are cowards—we weel show them!”

      Poor George! He hates to get his feet wet, and even Rodman Bishop’s yacht is torture to him in rough

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