HE inability of Margery Fleming to tell who had chloroformed her, and Mrs. Butler's white face and brooding eyes made a very respectable mystery out of the affair. Only Fred, Edith and I came down to breakfast that morning. Fred's expression was half amused, half puzzled. Edith fluttered uneasily over the coffee machine, her cheeks as red as the bow of ribbon at her throat. I was preoccupied, and, like Fred, I propped the morning paper in front of me and proceeded to think in its shelter.
"Did you find anything, Fred?" Edith asked. Fred did not reply, so she repeated the question with some emphasis.
"Eh—what?" Fred inquired, peering around the corner of the paper.
"Did—you—find—any—clue?"
"Yes, dear—that is, no. Nothing to amount to anything. Upon my soul, Jack, if I wrote the editorials of this paper, I'd say something." He subsided into inarticulate growls behind the paper, and everything was quiet. Then I heard a sniffle, distinctly. I looked up. Edith was crying—pouring cream into a coffee cup, and feeling blindly for the sugar, with her pretty face twisted and her pretty eyes obscured. In a second I was up, had crumpled the newspapers, including Fred's, into a ball, and had lifted him bodily out of his chair.
"When I am married," I said fiercely, jerking him around to Edith and pushing him into a chair beside her, "if I ever read the paper at breakfast when my wife is bursting for conversation, may I have some good and faithful friend who will bring me back to a sense of my duty." I drew a chair to Edith's other side. "Now, let's talk," I said.
She wiped her eyes shamelessly with her table napkin. "There isn't a soul in this house I can talk to," she wailed. "All kinds of awful things happening—and we had to send for coffee this morning, Jack. You must have used four pounds last night—and nobody will tell me a thing. There's no use asking Margery—she's sick at her stomach from the chloroform—and Ellen never talks except about herself, and she's horribly—uninteresting. And Fred and you make a ba—barricade out of newspapers, and fire 'yes' at me when you mean 'no.'"
"I put the coffee back where I got it, Edith," I protested stoutly. "I know we're barbarians, but I'll swear to that." And then I stopped, for I had a sudden recollection of going up-stairs with something fat and tinny in my arms, of finding it in my way, and of hastily thrusting it into the boys' boot closet under the nursery stair.
Fred had said nothing. He had taken her hand and was patting it gently, the while his eye sought the head-lines on the wad of morning paper.
"You burned that blue rug," she said to me disconsolately, with a threat of fresh tears. "It took me ages to find the right shade of blue."
"I will buy you that Shirvan you wanted," I hastened to assure her.
"Yes, to take away when you get married." There is a hint of the shrew in all good women.
"I will buy the Shirvan and not get married."
Here, I regret to say, Edith suddenly laughed. She threw her head back and jeered at me.
"You!" she chortled, and pointed one slim finger at me mockingly. "You, who are so mad about one girl that you love all women for her sake! You, who go white instead of red when she comes into the room! You, who have let your practice go to the dogs to be near her, and then never speak to her when she's around, but sit with your mouth open like a puppy begging for candy, ready to snap up every word she throws you and wiggle with joy!"
I was terrified.
"Honestly, Edith, do I do that?" I gasped. But she did not answer; she only leaned over and kissed Fred.
"Women like men to be awful fools about them," she said. "That's why I'm so crazy about Freddie." He writhed.
"If I tell you something nice, Jack, will you make it a room-size rug?"
"Room size it is."
"Then—Margery's engagement ring was stolen last night and when I commiserated her she said—dear me, the lamp's out and the coffee is cold!"
"Remarkable speech, under the circumstances," said Fred.
Edith rang the bell and seemed to be thinking. "Perhaps we'd better make it four small rugs instead of one large one," she said.
"Not a rug until you have told me what Margery said," firmly.
"Oh, that! Why, she said it really didn't matter about the ring. She had never cared much about it anyway."
"But that's only a matter of taste," I protested, somewhat disappointed. But Edith got up and patted me on the top of my head.
"Silly," she said. "If the right man came along and gave her a rubber teething ring, she'd be crazy about it for his sake."
"Edith!" Fred said, shocked. But Edith had gone.