With laughter and song and a flicker of candlelight everybody filed up-stairs to bed. Rollins carried his candle with the particularly unctuous pride of one who leads a torchlight procession. And as he turned on the upper landing and looked back, I noted that-behind the almost ribald excitement on his face there lurked a look of poignant wistfulness. "I've never been engaged before," he confided grinningly to Paul Brenswick. "I'd like to make the most of it . . ." Passing into my own room I flung back the casement windows for a revivifying slash of wind and rain, before I should collapse utterly into the white scrumptiousness of my bed. Frankly, I was very tired. It must have been almost midnight when I woke to see my Husband's dark figure silhouetted in the bright square of the door. Through the depths of my weariness a consuming curiosity struggled. "Did Ann Woltor come back?" I asked. "She did!" said my Husband succinctly. "And how did you get on with Allan John?" "Oh, I'm crazy about Allan John," I yawned amiably. And then with one of those perfectly inexplainable nerve-explosions that astonishes no one as much as it astonishes oneself I struggled up on my elbow. "But he's still got my best silver saltshaker in his pocket!" I cried. It was then that the scream of a siren whistle tore like some fear-maddened voice through the whole house. Shriller than knives it ripped and screeched into the senses! Doors banged! Feet thudded! "There's Allan John now!" I gasped. "It's the whistle the May Girl gave him!" CHAPTER III EVERYBODY looked pretty tired when they came down to breakfast the next morning. But at least everybody came down. Even Rollins! Never have I seen Rollins so really addicted to coming down to breakfast! Poor Allan John, of course, was all overwhelmed again with humiliation and despair, and quite heroically insistent on removing his presence as expeditiously as possible from our house party. It _was_ his whistle that had screeched so in the night. And as far as he knew he hadn't the slightest reason or excuse for so screeching it beyond the fact that, rousing half-awake and half-asleep from a most horrible nightmare, he had reached instinctively for the little whistle under his pillow, and not realizing what he was doing, cried for help, not just to man alone it would seem, but to High Heaven itself! "But however in the world did you happen to have the whistle under your pillow?" puzzled the Bride. "What else have I got?" answered Allan John. He was perfectly right! Robbed for all time of his wife and child, stripped for the ill-favored moment of all personal moneys and proofs of identity, sojourning even in other men's linen, what did Allan John hold as a nucleus for the New Day except a little silver toy from another person's shipwreck? (Once I knew a smashed man who didn't possess even a toy to begin a new day on so he didn't begin it!)