Thaxton arose wearily and went to meet his guests. All night he had mused happily on the rare chance which was to make Doris and himself housemates for an entire rapturous week--a week, presumably, in which Miss Gregg should busy herself on long daily inspection visits to Stormcrest. And now--an invalid and a cheery pest were to shatter that lovely solitude. CHAPTER IV TWO OR THREE INTRUDERS Yet luncheon was a gay enough meal. All the guests were old friends, and all were more or less congenial. Thaxton’s duties as host were in no way onerous, except when Willis Chase undertook to guy him as to his anomalous position as hotelkeeper--which Chase proceeded to do at intervals varying from two minutes to fifteen. In the afternoon, Miss Gregg was forced to drive across to Stormcrest, to superintend the first touches of the decorators to her remaining rooms. Clive made some excuse for retiring shakily to his own rooms for a rest. Willis Chase had to go back to Stockbridge on urgent business--having found, on unpacking, that in his haste he had brought along all his evening clothes except the trousers. Thus, for an hour or so, Vail had Doris Lane to himself. They idled about the grounds, Vail showing the girl his new sunken garden and his trout hatcheries. Throughout the dawdling tour they talked idly and blissfully, and withal a whit shyly, as do lovers on whom the Great Moment is making ready to dawn. At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable collie, Macduff. The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this mildly tepid day as a herald. To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds. There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore. Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock shelf. The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as if he feared it might turn and rend him. It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career. Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a safe distance. “What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused to watch the scene--the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in his time.”