“We can have anything sent in that we want,” he suggested speciously, “and if Dal doesn’t make good with the city fathers, you girls can get some clothes anyhow.  Then, we can have dinner sent from one of the hotels.”

“Why not all the meals?” Max suggested.  “I hope you’re not going to be small about things, Jimmy.”

“It ought to be easy,” Jim persisted, ignoring the remark, “for nine reasonably intelligent people to boil eggs and make coffee, which is all we need for breakfast, with some fruit.”

“Nine of us!” Dallas said wickedly, looking at Tom Harbison, who was out of earshot, “Why nine of us?  I thought Kit here, otherwise known as Bella, was going to show off her housewifely skill.”

It ended, however, with Mr. Harbison writing out a lot of slips, cook, scullery-maid, chamber-maid, parlor-maid, furnace-man, and butler, and as that left two people over—­we didn’t count Aunt Selina—­he added another furnace-man and a trained nurse.  Betty Mercer drew the trained nurse slip, and, of course, she was delighted.  It seems funny now to look back and think what a dreadful time she really had, for Aunt Selina took the grippe, you know, that very day.

It was fate that I should go back to that awful kitchen, for of course my slip said “cook.”  Mr. Harbison was butler, and Max and Dal got the furnace, although neither of them had ever been nearer to a bucket of coal than the coupons on mining stock.  Anne got the bedrooms, and Leila was parlor-maid.  It was Jimmy who got the scullery work, but he was quite crushed by this time, and did not protest at all.

Max was in a very bad temper; I suppose he had not had enough sleep—­no one had.  But he came over while the lottery was going on and stood over me and demanded unpleasantly, in a whisper, that I stop masquerading as another man’s wife and generally making a fool of myself—­which is the way he put it.  And I knew in my heart that he was right, and I hated him for it.

“Why don’t you go and tell him—­them?” I asked nastily.  No one was paying any attention to us.  “Tell them that, to be obliging, I have nearly drowned in a sea of lies; tell them that I am not only not married, but that I never intend to marry; tell them that we are a lot of idiots with nothing better to do than to trifle with strangers within our gates, people who build—­I mean, people that are worth two to our one!  Run and tell them.”

He looked at me for a minute, then he turned on his heel and left me.  It looked as though Max might be going to be difficult.

While I was improvising an apron out of a towel, and Anne was pinning a sheet into a kimono, so she could take off her dinner gown and still be proper, Dallas harked back to the robbery.

“Ann put the collar on the table there,” he said.  “There’s no mistake about that.  I watched her do it, for I remember thinking it was the sole reminder I had that Consolidated Traction ever went above thirty-nine.”