“May I come in?” she asked, and without waiting she came in and closed the door.  “You do look cozy!” she said, and shook herself free of snow.

Mr. Dick had turned white.  He got up with his eyes on her, and twice he opened his mouth and couldn’t speak.  He backed, still watching her, to his wife, and stood in front of her, as if to protect her.

Mr. Sam got his voice first.

“B—­bad night for a walk,” he said.

“Frightful!” she said.  “I’ve been buried to my knees.  May I sit down?” To those of us who knew, her easy manner had something horrible in it.

“Sorry there are no chairs, Julia,” Mr. Pierce said.  “Sit on the cot, won’t you?”

“Who is it?” Mrs. Dick asked from, as you may say, her eclipse.  She and Miss Summers were the only calm ones in the room.

“I—­I don’t know,” Mr. Dick stammered, but the next moment Miss Julia, from the cot, looked across at him and grinned.

“Well, Dicky!” she said.  “Who’d have thought it!”

“You said you didn’t know her!” his wife said from behind him.

“Who’d have thought wha—­what?” he asked with bravado.

“All this!” Miss Julia waved her hand around the room, with its bare walls, and blankets over the windows to keep the light in and the cold out, and the circle of us sitting around on sand boxes from the links and lawn rollers.  “To find you here, all snug in your own home, with your household gods and a wife.”  Nobody could think of anything to say.  “That is,” she went on, “I believe there is a wife.  Good heavens, Dicky, it isn’t Minnie?”

He stepped aside at that, disclosing Mrs. Dick on her box, with her childish eyes wide open.

“There—­there is a wife, Julia,” he said.  “This is her—­she.”

Well, she’d come out to make mischief—­it was written all over her when she came in the door, but when Mr. Dick presented his wife, frightened as he was and still proud of her, and Mrs. Dick smiled in her pretty way, Miss Summers just walked across and looked down at her with a queer look on her face.  I shut my eyes and waited for the crash, but nothing came, and when I opened them again there were the two women holding hands and Miss Summers smiling a sort of crooked grin at Mr. Dick.

“I ought to be very angry with your husband,” she said.  “I—­well, I never expected him to marry without my being among those present.  But since he has done it—!  Dick, you wretched boy, you took advantage of my being laid up with the mumps!”

“Mumps!” Mrs. Dick said.  “Why, he has just had them himself!” She looked around the circle suspiciously, and every one of us looked as guilty as if he had been caught with the mumps concealed around him somewhere.

“I didn’t have real mumps,” Mr. Dick explained.  “It was only—­er—­a swelling.”

“You said it was mumps, and even now you hate pickles!”

Mr. Pierce had edged over to Miss Summers and patted her shoulder.