Steve declined to take any part in the celebration, but at the conclusion of the event he appeared with policemen and a patrol wagon containing a cage, and amid gay farewells and grim coaxings Tawny Adonis was escorted to the railway station and shipped back to the circus man, at a loss of five hundred dollars--not counting the damage done--to the Gorgeous Girl! CHAPTER XV Trudy was keen as a brier whenever her own realm was threatened. With the shrewdness which caused her to refrain from ever speaking ill of a woman when talking to a man and never speaking aught but ill of women when talking to their own kind, she foresaw in Gay's constant attendance on the Gorgeous Girl the possibility of an unpleasant situation. For the Gorgeous Girl had said not only to her husband but to her friends that she must find some other kind of a good time now the novelty of the Villa Rosa was exhausted. Even inky people bored her, she added; poets were no longer permitted in her drawing room, and the circle of pet robins and angel ducks had somehow wandered out of her safe keeping. An unusually pretty flock of sweetsome debutantes had thinned the bachelor ranks, and Jill Briggs's youngest boy died of some childish ailment, disturbing Beatrice more than she admitted, for some reason, and making her own thoughts poor company. It was while she was talking of this child's death with Trudy that the latter glimpsed the handwriting on the wall, and with scantily concealed enmity determined to beat Beatrice at her own game. "Jill is going away for the winter, poor thing," Beatrice said. "I don't blame her; it would be too horrible to have to stay and see all his things about. And it's the second child she's lost. Goodness me, she has spent hundreds on baby specialists and nurses! Well, you know yourself, Trudy--you've seen how wonderful she has been. This boy's death has so distressed her that she has decided to have two nurses stay with the children instead of one. Mighty sweet of her, as it all comes out of Jill's pocketbook and not her husband's. She says she cannot think of leaving them with one person, and she must go away because her nerves are frazzled. "She is going to the West Indies with an artist friend, and they are going to make a marvellous collection of water-colour paintings of birds and flowers, a sort of memorial to the boy. Jill says she will sell them and give the proceeds for the _creche_ charity. Well, that is all very well for Jill to do; she has a real heartache to live down. But when you have no earthly reason to go and paint wild birds and flowers and you are bored to distraction with everything--" She shrugged her shoulders. "Meaning yourself?" asked Trudy. "Really?"--delighted that this was so. "Are you ever bored?"