Bettina went over to Aggie and clutched her arm.  “Do you mean to say,” she quavered, “that you three women went through a bridge—­”

“It was a small bridge,” I put in, to relieve her mind; “and only a foot or two of water below.  If only the man had not been so disagreeable—­”

“Oh,” she said, relieved, “you had a man with you!”

“We never take a man with us,” Aggie said with dignity.  “This one was fishing under the bridge and he was most ungentlemanly.  Quite refused to help, and tried to get the license number so he could sue us.”

“Sue you!”

“He claimed his arm was broken, but I distinctly saw him move it.”  Aggie, having adjusted her cap, was looking at it in the mirror.  “But dear Tish thinks of everything.  She had taken off the license plates.”

Bettina had gone really pale.  She seemed at a loss, and impatient at herself for being so.  “You—­you won’t have tea?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Would you—­perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda.”

Aggie turned on her a reproachful eye.  “My dear girl,” she said, “with the exception of a little home-made wine used medicinally we drink nothing.  I am the secretary of the Woman’s Prohibition Party.”

Bettina left us shortly after that to arrange for putting up Letitia and Aggie.  She gave them her mother’s room, and whatever impulse she may have had to put the Presbyterian Psalter by the bed, she restrained it.  By midnight Drummond’s “Natural Law” had disappeared from my table and a novel had taken its place.  But Bettina had not lost her air of bewilderment.

That first evening was very quiet.  A young man in white flannels called, and he and Letitia spent a delightful evening on the porch talking spark-plugs and carbureters.  Bettina sat in a corner and looked at the moon.  Spoken to, she replied in monosyllables in a carefully sweet tone.  The young man’s name was Jasper McCutcheon.

It developed that Jasper owned an old racing-car which he kept in the Bailey garage, and he and Tish went out to look it over.  They very politely asked us all to go along, but Bettina refusing, Aggie and I sat with her and looked at the moon.

Aggie in her capacity as chaperon, or as one of an association of chaperons, used the opportunity to examine Bettina on the subject of Jasper.

“He seems a nice boy,” she remarked.  Aggie’s idea of a nice boy is one who in summer wears fresh flannels outside, in winter less conspicuously.  “Does he live near?”

“Next door,” sweetly but coolly.

“He is very good-looking.”

“Ears spoil him—­too large.”

“Does he come around—­er—­often?”

“Only two or three times a day.  On Sunday, of course, we see more of him.”

Aggie looked at me in the moonlight.  Clearly the young man from the next door needed watching.  It was well we had come.

“I suppose you like the same things?” she suggested.  “Similar tastes and—­er—­all that?”