"That's why I wanted to see if you could," Bert grinned.

"Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters." Forrest paused
for a perceptible moment. "I always thought Rita was a real nice
sister. What's the matter with her?"

Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was
jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad
concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time
piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning
room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and
boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly
accoutered, in each other's arms, were parodying a dance never learned
at dancing school nor intended by the participants for male eyes to
see.

The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for
another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries,
collapsed, laughing, in each other's arms, and the music stopped. They
were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and
Forrest's eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that
it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.

Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human
kind, flew back and forth.

"I've been here five minutes," Dick Forrest asserted.

The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and
instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The