"Why, yes, that's so! Where is Allan John!" questioned everybody all at once. "Some walk he's taking," reflected Paul Brenswick. "Not too long I hope," worried my Husband very faintly. "Hang it all, I do like that lad," acknowledged George Keets. "Who wouldn't?" said Young Kennilworth. "Yes, but why?" demanded Keets. "It's his eyes," said the Bride. "Eyes nothing!" scoffed young Kennilworth. "It's the way he came out of his fuss without fussing! To make a fool of yourself but never a fuss--that's my idea of a fellow being a good sport!" "It was his tragedy that I was thinking of," said George Keets very quietly. "Yes, where in the world," questioned my Husband with quite unwonted emotion, "would you have found another chap in the same harrowing circumstances, even among your own friends, I mean, a chum, a pal, who could have dropped in here the way he has, without putting a damper on everything? Not intentionally, of course, but just in the inevitable human nature of things. But I don't get the slightest sense somehow of Allan John being a damper!" "'Damper?'" said the Bride. "Why he's like a sick man basking in the sun. Hasn't a word to say himself, not a single prance in his own feet. But I'd as soon think of shutting out the sun from a sick man as shutting out a laugh from Allan John. Why, Allan John needs us!" attested the Bride, "and Allan John knows that he needs us!" With a sideways glance at the vacant chair George Keets's thin lips parted into a really sweet smile. "Where in creation is the boy!" he insisted. "Frankly I think we rather need him." "All of which being the case," conceded my Husband, "it behooves me even once more, I should say, to tell Allan John that the next time he speaks about moving on I shall hide his clothes. Certainly I haven't trusted him yet with even a quarter. He's so extraordinarily fussy about thinking that he ought to clear out." It was just at that moment that the telephone rang. I decided to answer it myself, for some reason, from the instrument upstairs in my own room, rather than from the library. A minute's delay, and I held the transmitter to my lips. "Yes," I called. "Is this Mrs. Jack Delville?" queried the voice. "Yes. Who's speaking?" "It's Allan John," said the voice. "Why, Allan John!" I laughed. "Of course it would be you! We were just speaking about you, and that's always the funny way that things happen. But wherever in the world are you? We'd begun to worry a bit!" "I'm in town," said Allan John. "In town," I cried. "Town! How did you get there?"