The embers of her resentment were still glowing when the four finally seated themselves at the table.  A furtive glance in Pope’s direction showed that he was studiously avoiding her eyes:  she prepared once more to begin the process of flaying him.

“You’ve been away for some time, haven’t you?” Bob was asking.

Pope nodded.  “I hate New York.  I went as far away as I could get, and—­I managed to return just two jumps ahead of the sheriff.  It will take me six months to pay my debts.  I’m a grand little business man.”

“What was it this time?  Mining?”

“No.  Poultry.”  Adoree pricked up her ears.

“You went West, eh?” pursued Bob.

“No.  East—­Long Island.  Did you know there are parts of the Island that are practically unexplored by civilized man?  Well, there are.  They’re as remote from the influence of New York as the heart of New Guinea.”  Pope’s thin lips parted in a smile.  “The natives are all foreigners, too.  There are Portuguese pickle-pickers and hairy-handed Hollanders who live with their heads lower than their knees, and weed-pulling wops who skulk in patches of cauliflower and lettuce, but as for American settlers—­there ain’t none.”

Adoree complacently felt that she had the critic talking against time, and the consciousness of her disturbing over him gratified her intensely.

“Their language is a sort of Reverse English,” Pope went on, “and it’s a hard country to explore because of the dialects.  Some of the people are flesh-eaters, but the price of poultry is so high and the freight on eggs is so low that most of them are vegetarians.  That’s what got me started, in the first place—­I saw a great opportunity to make money; so I found a farm on a lake, bought it, and went to raising ducks.”

“Ducks!” breathlessly exclaimed Miss Demorest; but her interruption went unnoticed.

Campbell Pope’s features shone with the gentle light of a pleasurable remembrance.  “It was lovely and quiet out there, just like Saskatchewan or the Soudan.  Sometimes I fancied I must be close to the fringe of civilization, with the life of the outer world pulsing near at hand, for I could hear whispers of it; but I soon got over that idea.  The local inhabitants were shy but friendly; they did me no harm.  But—­it was no place for ducks; they swam all over the pond and spent so much time catching bugs on the bottom that they had no leisure for family obligations on land.”

This gloomy recital met with an interest that prompted him to continue, whimsically: 

“There was no home life among those ducks—­none whatever, but they could swim nearly as well as Miss Kellerman.  They never took cramps, either, although they appeared to have chronic bronchitis; and they must have learned to breathe through their tails, because they stood on their heads for hours at a time—­all I could see was acres of white tails sticking up like patches of Cubist pond-lilies.  They swam all their fat off, and I had the pond dredged and never found an egg.”