It is incredible, what three days of rest and forced feeding at my implacable hands, have done for Dinky-Dunk. He is still a little shaky on his pins, if he walks far, and the noonday sun makes him dizzy, but his eyes don’t look so much like saucers and I haven’t heard the trace of a cough from him all to-day. Illness, of course, is not romantic, but it plays its altogether too important part in life, and has to be faced. And there is something so disturbingly immuring and depersonalizing about it! Dinky-Dunk appears rather in a world by himself. Only once, so far, has he seemed to step back to our every-day old world. That was when he wandered into the Blue Room in the East Wing where little Dinkie has been sleeping. I was seated beside his little lordship’s bed singing:

and when that had been exhausted, rambling on to

when pater familias wandered in and inquired, “Whyfore the cabaret?”

I explained that Dinkie, since coming south, had seemed to demand an even-song or two before slipping off.

“I see that I’ll have to take our son in hand,” announced Dinky-Dunk—but there was just the shadow of a smile about his lips as he went slowly out and closed the door after him.

To-night, when I told Dinky-Dunk that Peter would in all likelihood be here to-morrow, he listened without batting an eyelash. But he asked if I’d mind handing him a cigarette, and he studied my face long and intently. I don’t know what he saw there, or what he concluded, for I did my best to keep it as noncommittal as possible. If there is any move, it must be from him. That sour-inked Irishman called Shaw has said that women are the wooers in this world. A lot he knows about it!... Yet something has happened, in the last half-hour, which both disturbs and puzzles me. When I was unpacking Dinky-Dunk’s second trunk, which had stood neglected for almost four long days, I came across the letter which I thought I’d put away in the back of the ranch ledger and had failed to find.... And he had it, all the time!

The redoubtable Struthers, it must be recorded, to-day handed me another paper, and almost as triumphantly as the first one. She’d picked it up on her way home from the druggist’s, where she went for aspirin for Dinky-Dunk. On what was labeled its “Woman’s Page” was yet another photographic reproduction of the fair Lady Allie in aviation togs and a head-line which read: “Insists On Tea Above The Clouds.” But I plainly disappointed the expectant Struthers by promptly handing the paper back to her and by declining to make any comment.