They helped him out. Only the finest of Martha's linen and silver, the thinnest of Winifred's plates and cups and the most precious of her glass would content them. When the table was set in the low-ceiled, casement-windowed old dining-room where Red Pepper was accustomed to bolt his meals alone when he took time for them at all, it was a table to suggest arrogantly the hand of woman, Winifred eyed it with milled satisfaction and concern. “It looks lovely, Martha, but not a bit bachelor-like. Do you suppose he'll mind?” “Not as long as the food is right; and judging by the heavenly smells from the kitchen there's no fear for that. But it's five o'clock, and the flowers he promised you haven't come. Do you suppose he's forgotten?” “Of course he has. If he remembers the dinner itself it'll be all we can expect of him. It doesn't matter. There are heaps of pink and crimson asters yet in the garden, and some fall anemones. We'll arrange them, and then if his flowers do come we'll change. But they won't.” They didn't. But the pink and crimson asters furnished a centrepiece decidedly more in keeping, somehow, with a men's dinner than roses would have been, and the decorators were content with them. Dora, Mrs. Macauley's own serving maid, who was to take the part of the waitress Red Pepper had not thought necessary, said they looked “awful tasty now.” “It's after seven and Red hasn't come yet.” Winifred Chester rushed at Arthur, dressing placidly. “Jim went in for the men with his car, and said he'd surely have them here by seven-twenty. You'll have to go over and do the honours for him till he comes. He'll have to dress after he gets here.” “He won't stop to dress--not if he's late,” predicted Chester, obediently hastening. “He'll rush in at the last minute, smelling horribly of antiseptics, and set everybody laughing with some story. They won't care what he wears. It's always a case of 'where MacGregor sits, there's the head of the table,' you know, with Red. I certainly hope nothing will make him late. I'm not up to playing host to a lot of physicians and surgeons. I should feel as if I were about to be operated on.” “Nonsense, dear, there's no jollier company when they're off duty. But Red isn't here yet, and I'm sure I hear Jim's Gabriel down the road. Do hurry!” Chester ran across the back lawn and in through Burns's kitchen, startling Cynthia so that she nearly dropped the salt-box into a sauce she was making for the beefsteak. He reached the little front porch just in time to welcome the batch of professional gentlemen who came talking and laughing up the path together. “Doctor Burns has been detained, but I'm sure he'll be here soon,” Chester explained, shaking hands, and discovering for himself which was the famous Scottish surgeon by the “rugged commonsense” look of the man, quite as R. P. Burns had characterized him.