“Well, let her go,” Billy remarked, after a moment when the guest seemed to find it hard to open the subject.

“Why, you see, I may seem very silly and egotistic to speak of it; but—­The fact is, didn’t any of you think it was strange that I didn’t try to go into the surf for Mac, yesterday?”

Three of the women before him made a polite murmur of dissent.  The fourth was silent; but Dr. McAlister said frankly,—­

“Yes.  It wasn’t at all like my idea of you, Mr. Barrett.”

The young man looked pleased.

“Thank you, doctor,” he said heartily.  “I value that sort of compliment.  But I didn’t want to go away from here and leave you to think me an arrant coward.  The truth is, I shouldn’t have been of much use to Mac or to myself.  I’m not swimming, this summer, for I was unlucky enough to break my arm, last June, and it’s not at all strong yet.”

Quickly Billy put out his hand.

“I’m glad to know this, Barrett,” he said.  “I haven’t been quite fair to you.”

“I wish you had told us before,” Theodora added laughingly.  “We haven’t had time to compare notes yet; but there is no telling what some of us may have thought about it.  But isn’t it very bad for your music, Mr. Barrett?”

“It came at an inconvenient time,” he admitted; “for I was in the middle of some work, and I have had to let it all go.”

“How did it happen?” Hope asked sympathetically.  “I hope it wasn’t a bad break.”

“A compound fracture of the right arm,” he replied.  “It wasn’t a pleasing break; but it was a good deal more pleasing than the way it happened.”

“How was that?” Billy looked up expectantly, for the young man’s tone was suggestive of a story yet untold.

Gifford Barrett laughed.

“It was very absurd, very ignominious; but the fact is, I was run into by a woman, one day in a pelting shower, and knocked heels over head off my bicycle.”

Sitting in the doorway, Phebe had been holding a book in her hands.  Now it fell to the floor with a crash.

“Drop something, Babe?” Hubert asked amicably.

“Yes, my book,” she answered shortly.

“I shall never forget my emotions at the time,” Gifford Barrett was saying to Billy.  “I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower.  The road was all up and down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the other.  She had lost both her pedals, and you’ve no idea how she looked, bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind.  She hadn’t even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn’t an atom of romance in the affair from first to last.  She was a great, overgrown country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and arms and a skull.  What do you suppose she could have been doing with them?  She was too young and fair to have been an undertaker.”