would take a magician's wand to produce the red rose."

"I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks," he remembered.
"It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in
disguise. You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red
rose."

She threw back a laugh and was gone.

When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the
"bachelors' barracks," as the master of "Idle Times" dubbed the wing
where the unmarried men were quartered.

Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been
unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon. Between his quarters and
these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space.
Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the "neutral zone," as Van
called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or
connecting their individual chambers.

Now a blaze of transoms and a sound of voices proclaimed that the
apartments were tenanted. Benton entered his own unlighted room, and
then with his hand at the electric switch halted in embarrassment.

The folding-doors between his apartment and the "neutral territory"
stood wide, and the attitudes and voices of the two men he saw there
indicated their interview to be one in which outsiders should have no
concern. To switch on the light would be to declare himself a witness to
a part at least; to remain would be to become unwilling auditor to more;
to open the door he had just closed behind him would also be to attract