“The tamer they are, the more they pine to hear the silver trumpet of romance under their windows,” she replied, her eyes dancing. He was growing deeply interested. She was no ordinary person, this girl. “I see one obstacle,” he replied dubiously. “Would you mind telling me just how you’re going to effect these combinations--assemble the parts, so to speak; or, in your more poetical manner, make the characters harken to the silver horn?” “That,” she replied readily, “is the easiest part of all! You’ve already lost so much time that this is an emergency case and we’ll call them by telegraph!” “You don’t mean that--not really!” “Just that! We’ll have to decide what combination would be the most amusing. We should want to bring together the most utterly impossible people--people who’d just naturally hate each other if they were left in the same room. In that way you’d quicken the action.” He laughed aloud at the possibilities; but she went on blithely: “We ought to have a person of national distinction--a statesman preferred; some one who figures a lot in the newspapers. Let’s begin,” she suggested, “with the person in all the United States who has the least sense of humor.” “The competition would be keen for that honor,” said Farrington, “but I suggest the Honorable Tracy B. Banning, the solemnest of all the United States senators--Idaho or Rhode Island--I forget where he hails from. It doesn’t matter.” “I hoped you’d think of him,” she exclaimed, striking her hands together delightedly. “He owns a house--huge, ugly thing--on the other side of Corydon.” “Um! I think I’ve heard of it,” she replied indifferently. She drew from her sweater pocket and spread on the table these articles: a tiny vanity box, a silver-backed memorandum book, two caramels and the stub of a lead-pencil. There was a monogram on the vanity box, and remembering this she returned it quickly to her pocket. He watched her write the Senator’s name in her book, in the same vertical hand in which the note making the appointment had been written. She lifted her head, narrowing her eyes with the stress of thought. “If a man has a wife we ought to include her, perhaps.” Farrington threw back his head and laughed. “Seems to me his wife’s divorcing him--or the other way round. The press has been featuring them lately.” “Representative of regrettable tendency in American life,” she murmured. “They go down as Mr. and Mrs.” “Now it’s your turn,” he said. “Suppose we put in a gay and cheerful character now to offset the Senator. I was reading the other day about the eccentric Miss Sallie Collingwood, of Portland, Maine; she’s rich enough to own a fleet of yachts, but she cruises up and down the coast in a disreputable old schooner--has a mariner’s license and smokes a pipe. Is she selected?” “I can’t believe there’s anybody so worth while on earth!”