Mr. and Mrs. Brownley had gone to Chicago the day after Mrs. Thorstad had gone home and the three girls were alone in the house with the servants. There had been a gay party at a hotel ballroom and at one o’clock the three girls had left the hotel with their escorts. Ted had his small car and Freda had wanted him to take Barbara home. But Barbara had demurred, strangely enough. She was going in the big car with the others, she said. Barbara had been making life hard for Freda all day. Wherever they had been she had managed to make Freda miserable. When the older Brownleys were home, and when her mother was with her, Freda had never been so completely at Barbara’s mercy as she was to-day. Allie, her usual ally, had suddenly fallen away too. The fact was that Allie, having pressed her mother for the purchase of the new runabout, had been put off on the ground that her father said it was too expensive and on the further ground that Freda’s visit was not over and that anyway Mrs. Brownley had made no definite promise. Allie was disgruntled and the enthusiasm she had had for Freda having run its brief course, like most of Allie’s enthusiasms, she was willing to lend some slight support to Barbara’s evident ennui with their guest. All through luncheon Barbara had engineered an extremely rude conversation about things and places which were entirely foreign to Freda. Not once had she let her guest slip into the conversation. She had misled Freda deliberately into wearing her flame colored satin dress to a very informal afternoon affair and appeared herself, like every one else, in the most simple suit, making Freda feel foolishly over dressed. It was a little thing but it pricked Freda. At dinner she had asked some people to come in whom she knew would follow her lead and they had again left Freda high and dry on the conversational sands. It had not been a pleasant day and even as they danced, she and Ted, that evening, Freda felt Barbara’s eyes rather scornfully on her and guessed at the little tide of innuendo that was being set in motion. She knew Barbara’s ways by this time. She could not stand it another day, she vowed. In the morning she would see Mrs. Flandon or go to a hotel or back to Mohawk. It was clear that the others had not arrived when they drove up under the Brownley porte-cochère where a single light was burning. Freda did not want Ted to come in. She wanted to make her escape to bed before Barbara might arrive and make her a further target. Besides it was clear that Ted had been drinking and that he was most amorous. But he was insistent. The others would be along in a minute and he wanted to see one of the boys, he said. They went into the long drawing-room. A single standing lamp was lit beside a big divan and at Freda’s gesture as if she would turn on more, Ted caught her hand. “Quite enough light,” he said. “Come sit down.”