"Oh, Peter, is it about the play?" I gasped as I fairly hung on to his arm while he was languidly giving my traveling-bag to a footman. Peter looked like a literary version of what Sam called "the last of pea-time," which is a very vivid expression to a person who has just seen her poor peas drop away in the August garden. "What has happened?" "I care nothing more about the play, Betty. It is stolen from me," answered Peter, gloomily, as he led me through the Pennsylvania Station and up the steps toward the limousine, where I knew Mabel would be waiting to eat me up and be in turn devoured. "Why, Peter, what can you mean?" I gasped. "I'll tell you all about it when I get you to myself. Don't mention it to Mabel--she doesn't understand," he answered from behind his teeth as he put me into the car and into Mabel's arms, and also into Miss Greenough's. But for all my joy at seeing both those dear friends again I couldn't help being depressed by every glance at Peter, sitting opposite me, looking white and glum. "Don't notice him--he's more impossible than ever," said Mabel, once, when Peter leaned out to be reproachful to the chauffeur for doing his duty and keeping us waiting for the traffic signal. "I'll tell you all when I get you alone." Judge Vandyne met us at the lodge gate of the great Vandyne home out on the Island. He, too, treated Peter like a sick baby. I never was so puzzled; and dinner would have seemed long but for the fact that they all wanted to hear so much about Sam and The Briers and the whole Harpeth Valley. I never more enjoyed telling anything, and even Peter's gloom lightened when I told him about the fat little duck the Byrd had insisted on sending him--alive in a box. Daddy was secretly expressing it to me, on the sleeping-car porter's kindly advice, when he saw it in my baggage. "Well, well," said Judge Vandyne, as he came into the drawing-room with us after dinner, "young Crittenden is really getting to goal on that farm question. I'm glad you sent me that report--it set some big things in motion. I'll tell you about it when I get you alone," he added, under his breath. And that was another time that made me feel as if I were a baby that ought to be sliced up to be divided. As it was, Peter got me first, and I don't blame him for being in agony. That is, I didn't blame Peter, but neither do I blame Farrington, now that I have talked to him. This was Peter's tale of woe: "Stolen, it is absolutely stolen from me, Betty, and I am helpless to protect the child of my brain," he began. The judge and Mabel had at last left us alone, probably because they hesitated to have Peter commit patricide and fratricide, if those are the right terms for sister and father murder. "How, Peter?" I asked, taking his hand with deep sympathy.