Betty Jo was first to recover: "I am sure that it is quite time for
Auntie Sue to come home and take charge of her own household again.
Don't you think so, Mr. Burns?"

And Brian Kent most heartily agreed.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW.


The members of the clubhouse party were amusing themselves that
afternoon in the various ways peculiar to their kind.

At one end of the wide veranda overlooking the river a group sat at a
card table. At the other end of the roomy lounging place, men and women,
lying at careless ease in steamer-chairs and hammocks, were smoking and
chatting about such things as are of interest only to that strange
class who are educated to make idleness the chief aim and end of their
existence. On the broad steps leading down to the tree-shaded lawn,
which sloped gently to the boat landing at the river's edge, still
other members of the company were scattered in characteristic attitudes.
Across the river, in the shade of the cottonwoods that overhang the
bank, a man and a woman in a boat were ostensibly fishing. In a hammock
strung between two trees, a little way from the veranda, lay a woman,
reading.