Nobody understood Dal’s wrath then, but it seems he meant to arrange the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour nearly come, he intended to wager that he could break the quarantine, and to take any odds he could get that he would free the entire party in half an hour.  As for the plan itself, it was idiotically simple; we were perfectly delighted when we heard it.  It was so simple and yet so comprehensive.  We didn’t see how it could fail.  Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the strength of it, and Anne was furious.  Jim was not so much pleased, for some reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than merry.  Aunt Selina had gone to bed.

The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and yelled “fire” and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as quickly as we could.

You can see how simple it was.

We were terribly excited, of course.  Every one rushed madly for motor coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people going the same direction would have the same machine.  We called to each other as we dressed about Mamaroneck or Lakewood or wherever we happened to have relatives.  Everybody knew everybody else, and his friends.  The Mercer girls were going to cruise until the trouble blew over, the Browns were going to Pinehurst, and Jim was going to Africa to hunt, if he could get out of the harbor.

Only the Harbison man seemed to have no plans; quite suddenly with the world so near again, the world of country houses and steam yachts and all the rest of it, he ceased to be one of us.  It was not his world at all.  He stood back and watched the kaleidoscope of our coats and veils, half-quizzically, but with something in his face that I had not seen there before.  If he had not been so self-reliant and big, I would have said he was lonely.  Not that he was pathetic in any sense of the word.  Of course, he avoided me, which was natural and exactly what I wished.  Bella never was far from him and at the last she loaded him with her jewel case and a muff and traveling bag and asked him to her cousins’ on Long Island.  I felt sure he was going to decline, when he glanced across at me.

“Do go,” I said, very politely.  “They are charming people.”  And he accepted at once!

It was a transparent plot on Bella’s part:  Two elderly maiden ladies, house miles from anywhere, long evenings in the music room with an open fire and Bella at the harp playing the two songs she knows.

When we were ready and gathered in the kitchen, in the darkness, of course, Dal went up on the roof and signaled with a lantern to the cars on the drive.  Then he went downstairs, took a last look at the drawing room, fired the papers, shook on the powder, opened the windows and yelled “fire!”