The third morning dawned even rainier than the second! Infinitely rainier than the first! It gave everybody's coming-down-stairs expression a curiously comical twist as though Dame Nature herself had been caught off-guard somehow in a moment of dishabille that though inexpressibly funny, couldn't exactly be referred to--not among mere casual acquaintances--not so early in the morning, anyway! Yet even though everybody rushed at once to the fireplace instead of to the breakfast-table nobody held us responsible for the weather. Everyone in fact seemed to make rather an extra effort to assure us that he or she--as the case might be, most distinctly did not hold us responsible. Paul Brenswick indeed grew almost eloquent telling us about an accident to the weather which he himself had witnessed in a climate as supposedly well-regulated as the climate of South Eastern Somewhere was supposed to be! Ann Woltor raked her cheerier memories for the story of a four days' rain-storm which she had experienced once in a very trying visit to her great aunt somebody-or-other on some peculiarly stormbound section of the Welsh coast. George Keet's chivalrous anxiety to set us at our ease was truly heroic. He even improvised a parody about it: "Rain," observed George Keets, "makes strange umbrella-mates!" A leak had developed during the night it seemed in the ceiling directly over his bed--and George, the finicky, the fastidious, the silk-pajamered--had been obliged to crawl out and seek shelter with Rollins and his flannel night-cap in the next room. And Rollins, it appeared, had not proved a particularly genial host. "By the way, where is Mr. Rollins this morning?" questioned the Bride from her frowning survey of the storm-swept beach. "Mr. Rollins," confided my Husband, "has a slight headache this morning." "Why, that's too bad," sympathized Ann Woltor. "No, it isn't a bad one at all," contradicted my Husband. "Just the very mildest one possible--under the circumstances. It was really very late when he got in again last night. And very wet." From under his casually lowered eyes a single glance of greeting shot out at me. "Now, there you are again!" cried George Keets. "Flirting! You married people! Something that anyone else would turn out as mere information,--'The Ice Man has just left two chunks of ice!' or 'Mr. Rollins has a headache'!--you go and load up with some mysterious and unfathomable significance! Glances pass! Your wife flushes!" "Mysterious?" shrugged my Husband. "Unfathomable? Why it's clear as crystal. The madam says, 'Let there be a headache'--and there _is_ a headache!"