"And loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago?" murmured Bretton. "Everybody loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago, you know!" shrugged Kaire. "No, I didn't know," said Bretton. "I was in New Zealand about that time. It was at an insane asylum in Chicago that I first saw Martha." "At an insane asylum?" frowned Kaire. "I knew she'd gone queer, but I never knew it was as queer as that." "It was quite as queer as that," said Bretton, a bit dryly. "Right in the midst of one of her best vaudeville acts, it seems, she went into hysterics because a man in the front row had on a red tie--and on the way home to her hotel she fainted in her carriage at a scarlet [203] hat in some brilliantly lighted shop window. So they shut her up. And a medical friend of mine was quite a bit interested in the case. Most extraordinarily simple his explanation was. No Indian massacres involved, no hidden Bluebeard Chambers. Something as trivial, perhaps, as a kitten's cut foot bleeding across a child's first white dress--a nervous injury so trivial that no one had stopped to investigate it. . . . But thirty years afterward, when Life got ready to smash her, it went back thirty years and smashed her there! Seems sort of too bad though," mused Bretton, "to have to be shut up just because you can't digest red. Some people, you know, can't digest oysters. And at least two friends of mine experience an almost complete mental stoppage at the very mention of Suffrage. Yet _they_ are still at large! . . . So we got Martha out of the asylum," he quickened, "and reinvested her life and her fortunes in an all-green jungle, where, except for a curious impression that I am her benefactor, and the unspoken but doubtless persistent apprehension that she may even yet sight the crimson of a gay yacht-cushion or [204] the flare of a tourist's sweater and revert to chaos again, she seems to me perfectly normal." With a little grim smack of his lips he seemed to bite off the end of his narrative. "And that, Sheridan Kaire," he snapped, "is the full and complete account of my acquaintance with Martha. . . . But yours----" he attested very slowly, very distinctly, "was not the full and complete account of yours!" With his voice as quiet as a knife Kaire swung round from his table corner. "Since when, Mr. Bretton," he asked, "has it been considered healthy for one man to call another a liar?" "Whatever worry you have about the healthiness of anything," smiled Bretton, "should concern yourself, I think--rather than me. . . . No one will ever shut _me_ up," he smiled, "because, like poor Martha, I also am just a little bit color-mad! 'Seeing red' though isn't what bothers me, you understand?--it's seeing _yellow_!" "You think I have a yellow streak?" flushed Kaire. "Most of us have," smiled Bretton. "But [205] yours--at the moment--looks to me unduly broad!" "Why, Old-Dad!" flamed Daphne. "How can you speak so to--to the man I'm going to marry?