“Nonsense!” Max said gruffly.  “If it’s a practical joke, Jim, why don’t you fess up?  Anne has worried enough.”

“The pearls are not there, I tell you,” Jim began.  Although the studio was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face.  “I must ask you not to move those pictures.”  And then Aunt Selina came to the rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of canvases.

“As far as I can understand this,” she declaimed, “you gentlemen are trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman’s jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket.  Certainly you will not move the pictures.  How do you know that the young gentleman who said he found it there didn’t have it up his sleeve?”

She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered.  Dallas soothed her, however.

“Exactly so,” he said.  “How do we know that Max didn’t have the clasp up his sleeve?  My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace.  I suggest tea on the roof; those in favor—?  My arm, Miss Caruthers.”

It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn’t dare to have the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus girl photographs and life-class crayons that were not for Aunt Selina’s eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of whisky.  Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion and discord in the house.

Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery.  Anne drank her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude that boded ill to somebody.  The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her).  Betty and Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like a pair of children.  It was quite certain that neither his escape from death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.

While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of his nose—­I forget which—­Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the privacy of the roof for his training hour.

Yes, he was training.  Flannigan claimed to know the system that had reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening.  He claimed to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.

The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery.  They sandpapered the inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the tent.  Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about it, and merely said it was part of his system.  Dal said that if he had anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid of it.