I was quite speechless; every one was looking, and no one could help.  It was clear Jim was racking his brain, and we sat staring desperately at each other across the candles.  Everything I had ever known faded from me, eight pairs of eyes bored into me, Mr. Harbison’s politely amused.

“I don’t remember,” I said at last.  “Really, I don’t believe—­” Aunt Selina smiled in a superior way.

“Now, don’t you recall it?” she insisted.  “I said:  ’Baking soda in water taken internally for cucumbers; baking soda and water externally, rubbed on, when he gets that dreadful, itching strawberry rash.’”

I believe the dinner went on.  Somebody asked Aunt Selina how much over-charge she had paid in foreign hotels, and after that she was as harmless as a dove.

Then half way through the dinner we heard a crash in Takahiro’s pantry, and when he did not appear again, Jim got up and went out to investigate.  He was gone quite a little while, and when he came back he looked worried.

“Sick,” he replied to our inquiring glances.  “One of the maids will come in.  They have sent for a doctor.”

Aunt Selina was for going out at once and “fixing him up,” as she put it, but Dallas gently interfered.

“I wouldn’t, Miss Caruthers,” he said, in the deferential manner he had adopted toward her.  “You don’t know what it may be.  He’s been looking spotty all evening.”

“It might be scarlet fever,” Max broke in cheerfully.  “I say, scarlet fever on a Mongolian—­what color would he be, Jimmy?  What do yellow and red make?  Green?”

“Orange,” Jim said shortly.  “I wish you people would remember that we are trying to eat.”

The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr. Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering, no doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition.  Ages afterward I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that night, and that he supposed from the way I glared across the table, that I had quarreled with my husband!

“I am afraid you are not well,” he said at last, noticing my food untouched on my plate.  “We should not have come, any of us.”

“I am perfectly well,” I replied feverishly.  “I am never ill.  I—­I ate a late luncheon.”

He glanced at me keenly.  “Don’t let them stay and play bridge tonight,” he urged.  “Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not?  And you are really fagged.  You look it.”

“I think it is only ill humor,” I said, looking directly at him.  “I am angry at myself.  I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly.”

Max would have said “Impossible,” or something else trite.  The Harbison man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.

“Is it too late to undo it?” he asked.