“Oh! piffle!  I don’t fall for that.”

“I did.”

“Then why did you beat it so quick?”

“Well, you see—­I suppose I was jealous of your elegantly dressed young friend.”

“Him?  He’s just a kid.  A mere child!”

“He seemed very much at home.”

“Kids like him always do.  They make me sick—­always putting on as though they were grown up.”

She secured an olive and bit into it with a relish.  “Awful good—­these olives.  I love queen olives, don’t you.  I used to be crazy about ripe olives, but I read in a book once that sometimes they poison you, and when they do—­there just simply isn’t any anecdote in the world that can save you.  So I figured there wasn’t any use taking chances—­”

Carroll let her run on until the meal was served.  And it was then when she was satisfying a normal youthful appetite that he drove straight to the subject which had led to this masculine martyrdom.

“The day before Mr. Warren died,” he said mildly—­“are you sure that your sister made the suggestion that you spend the night with Miss Gresham?”

“Her?  Sure she did.”

“Didn’t it strike you as peculiar—­knowing that she’d be in the house alone all that night?”

“I’ll say it did.  I asked her was she nutty and she scolded me for being slangy.  So I told her I should worry—­if she wanted to suffer alone, and I went with Hazel.  And it’s an awful good thing I did, because if I hadn’t she would have been arrested and tried and convicted and hanged—­or something, and—­”

“Oh! hardly that bad.  You’re sure your sister was alone in the house that night?”

“Sure.  Who could have been there with her?”

“I’m not answering riddles.  I’m asking them.”

“I’ve got my fingers crossed.  The answer is that there wasn’t any one there.  At first I thought she was going out—­but she wasn’t, and when I asked her was she, she got real peeved at me.”

“Aa-a-h!  You thought she was going out that night?”

“Uh-huh,” came the answer between bites at a huge lobster salad.

“What made you think that?”

“Oh! just something.  You know, I don’t get credit for having eyes, but I sure have.  And I never did understand that business anyway.  But then Sis always has been the queerest thing—­ever since she married Gerald.  Say—­” she looked up eagerly—­“ain’t he the darndest old crab you ever saw in your life?”

“Why, I—­”

“Ain’t he?  Honest?”

“He’s not exactly jovial.”

“He’s a lemon!  Just a plain juicy lemon.  And I think she was a nut for marrying him.”

“But—­” Carroll proceeded cautiously—­“you made the remark just now that something was the queerest thing.  What did you mean by that?”

“Oh!  I guess I was crazy—­or something.  But she got sore at me when I asked her—­”

“Who?”

“Sis.”