“Miss Stearns here!” repeated the highly colored lips.  Then shoulders shrugged and scorn fairly sizzled through an indescribable sneer.  “I do not check up the patrons.  She may be in a chair within.  Will you enter?”

The girls surrounding Jane tittered audibly.  Since when had plain Dol Vin become so foreign?

“En—­ter!” drawled Dozia.  “Yes, let’s,” to Jane.  This little hiss was intended as a reactionary simper.

“Miss Stearns would not be here on professional business,” retorted Jane.  “And she would never occupy one of your treatment chairs.”  Jane hated to dignify anything in the beauty shop with that description, but acid terms were elusive just then; and besides Jane was now getting anxious about Judith.

“Oh, indeed!” more shoulder shrugging and a futurist pose of the black satin “clinger,” “What else, then, might the Lady Stearns be doing at my place?”

“Dol Vincez, you just stop that nonsense,” flared Dozia Dalton, stepping up to the fancy little door defiantly.  “We saw Judith Stearns run in here after Shirley Duncan, and you know very well that old officer Sandy came in after her.  Now where is Judith?”

“Isn’t it lovely to have you all here?  And begging me for something?” Hands on hips, then a shift of the right hand to a very black ball of hair bunched out where the human ear usually reposes.  “I am delighted I am sure with this visitation, and I’d love to ask you all in only I’m busy.  You will have to excuse me,” and with a very Frenchy bow, the Queen of the Beauty Shop got behind the squared glass door and pushed it shut till the latch clicked.

“Shut the door in our faces,” growled Velma, as if everyone had not seen the insulting act.

Jane stood for a moment, thinking seriously and swiftly.  She was not concerned with the girls about her; neither had she any of their curiosity about the interior of the shop.  She was wondering what it all meant, and how she could trace Judith.  A brilliant thought captured her.  Why not go inside for a shampoo?

She turned to her companions.  “I suppose it is perfectly proper under the circumstances to go inside—­somehow.  I’ll apply for a shampoo!”

“But the rest of us?” wailed the curious Velma.

“Ask for something else,” suggested the resourceful Jane.

“Perhaps she won’t answer the ring,” parried Janet.

“Then we’ll knock,” threatened Jane, as she pressed the little button over the “treatment hours” sign.

They waited.  There were Jane, Dozia, Velma, Winifred, Janet and Inez, six palpitating girls, each taking inventory of her possible beauty spots that might need touching up.  Even Dol Vin would succumb to such an onslaught of orders, but—­

“Suppose she charges us some dreadful price—­like five dollars each?” gasped Velma.

“Can’t do it,” declared Jane.  “We’ll go by her price list.  But no one seems to answer.”