"You _oughtn't_ to have let him go, Potter," she said. Potter shrugged his shoulders--those square American shoulders of his. "Strange as it may seem to you, he wanted to. That settled it. I didn't monkey with the gunpowder." Mrs. Ess Kay's lips went down at the corners, and her eyes flashed. "How easy it is to see that woman's game," said she. "Cora Pitchley knows that Mrs. Van der Windt and the committee will be only too anxious for us to go to the Pink Ball _now_, and she thinks she sees a way of getting there too, after all. Mark my words, she's got her Earl; it'll go hard with her if she doesn't _stick_ to him. Betty, can't you do something? He's your cousin. You've a right to him." "I don't know that I want him particularly," I confessed. "Mohunsleigh's a dear, queer old thing, and I'm fond of him; but we haven't seen much of him at home, for years. And I know he can't be bothered with me." "Anyhow, he certainly ought to be here," said Mrs. Ess Kay, anxiously; "it will be perfectly loathsome if we have to sit still and see the Pitchley's gobble him up." "Poor Mohunsleigh!" I exclaimed. "Why, what will they _do_ with him?" And for a lurid instant I beheld Miss Pitchley and Carolyn as beautiful ogresses, with their lips red--too red. "They'll go to the Pink Ball with him, and by him. They couldn't without him. That's what they'll _do_," said Mrs. Ess Kay, as if she saw my cousin's whitening bones picked clean by the Pitchley family. "And we shall have to be intimate with them, the whole time he stays." "Oh, you needn't feel bound to for my sake. It isn't as though Mohunsleigh----" I began; but Mrs. Ess Kay snapped my poor sentence in two, as if it had been cotton on a reel. "I have to think for all of us," said she; "Cora Pitchley is a climber." We changed our dresses (Sally says one must be forever changing one's dress at Newport), lunched; and then at the door appeared a gorgeous white motor car lined with scarlet, which I had never seen before. As we all had on white, from head to foot, we matched it beautifully; and feeling that we looked nice enough even to grace an accident, if it _must_ come, we started to pick up Carolyn Pitchley and my cousin. Mrs. Ess Kay didn't go, for she wasn't quite herself yet; and besides, she perhaps thought that in the circumstances Mohunsleigh ought to be brought to call before she met him informally. I don't know that any of us were as sorry as we ought to have been not to have her.