"Not now," he grinned at her. "I haven't lost my mind yet, nor am I raving. Ladies and gentlemen," Val prepared to echo Creighton's speech of an hour before, "permit me to introduce Roderick St. Jean de Roche Ralestone, the missing heir!" With an impish grin Val had never seen on his face before, Jeems clicked his heels in a creditable imitation of a court bow. CHAPTER XVIII RUPERT BRINGS HOME HIS MARCHIONESS "Such a nice domestic scene," Val observed. Ricky looked up from the bowl into which she was shelling peas. "Now just what do you mean by that?" she asked suspiciously. "Nothing, nothing at all. It's getting so I can't say a word around here without you suspecting some sort of a catch in it," her brother complained. He shifted the drawing-board Rod had fixed up for him an inch or two. Although Val's arm was at last out of the sling, he was not supposed to use it unless absolutely necessary. "Well, after that afternoon when you made the missing heir appear like a rabbit out of a hat--" began his sister. "Rod," Val called down to where their cousin was busied over the stretching of the new badminton net, "did you hear that? She referred to you as a rabbit--deliberately." "Hm-m," Rod answered in absent-minded fashion. "That cat of Miss Charity's just walked away with one of those feathered things yo' bat 'round." "Let us hope that he returns it in time," Val said; "otherwise I can prophesy that you are going to spend the rest of the morning crawling around under hedges and things hunting for him and it. Ricky will not be balked. If she says that we are going to play badminton--well, we are going to play badminton." "I think that you might help too." Ricky attacked a fresh pod viciously as their cousin came up on the terrace. He stopped for a moment by Ricky's chair, long enough to gather the pods together on the paper she had put down for them, piling them up in a more orderly fashion than she was capable of. "Doing what?" Val inquired. "You know that Lucy has chased everyone out of the house. And now that Rod has finished setting out the lawn sports, what is there left to do? By the way, did Sam mend that croquet mallet, the one with the loose head?" "The one that you broke hitting the stone with when you aimed at your ball yesterday?" she asked sweetly. "Yes, I saw to that this morning." "Then what more is there to worry about? Let the party begin." Val reached for his box of pencils.