"Oh, she's having a good time, all right," I hastened to assure him. "Three perfectly eligible young men all competing for her favor!" "Only three?" laughed the voice. "You surprise me!" "And speaking of originality," I rallied instantly to that laugh, "she has invented the most diverting game! She is playing at being-engaged-to-a-different-man--every day of her visit. Oh _very_ circumspectly, you understand," I hastened to affirm. "Nothing serious at all!" "No, I certainly hope not," mumbled the voice again through some maddeningly soggy connection. "Because, you see, I'm rather expecting to marry her myself on the fifteenth of September next." CHAPTER IV SLEEP is a funny thing! Really comical I mean! A magician's trick! "Now you have it--and now you don't!" Certainly I had very little of it the night of Dr. Brawne's telephone conversation. I was too surprised. Yet staring up through those long wakeful hours into the jetty black heights of my bedroom ceiling it didn't seem to be so much the conversation itself as the perfectly irrelevant events succeeding that conversation that kept hurtling back so into my visual consciousness--The blueness of the May Girl's eyes! The brightness of her hair!--Rollins's necktie! The perfectly wanton hideousness of Rollins's necktie!--The bang--_bang_--_bang_ of a storm-tortured shutter way off in the ell somewhere. Step by step, item by item, each detail of events reprinted itself on my mind. Fumbling back from the shadowy telephone-stand into the brightly lighted upper hall with the single desire to find my Husband and confide to him as expeditiously as possible this news which had so amazed me, I had stumbled instead upon the May Girl herself, climbing somewhat listlessly up the stairs toward bed, Rollins was close behind her carrying her book and a filmy sky-blue scarf. George Keets followed with a pitcher of water. "Oh, it isn't Good Night, dear, is it?" I questioned. "Yes," said the May Girl. "I'm--pretty tired." She certainly looked it. Rollins quite evidently was in despair. He was not to accomplish his 'kiss' after all, it would seem. All the long day, I judged, he had been whipping up his cheeky courage to meet some magic opportunity of the evening. And now, it appeared, there wasn't going to be any evening! Even the last precious moment indeed was to be ruined by George Keets's perfidious intrusion! It was the Bride's voice though that rang down the actual curtain on Rollins's "Perfect Day." "Oh, Miss Davies!--Miss Davies!" called the Bride. "You mustn't forget to return your ring, you know!" "Why, no, so I mustn't," rallied the May Girl. Twice I heard Rollins swallow very hard. Any antique was sacred to him, but a family antique. Oh, ye gods! "K--K--Keep the ring!" stammered Rollins. It was the nearest point to real heroism surely that funny little Rollins would ever attain.