"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" Dick shouted, stamping with jingling
spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.

He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door
without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick
shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the
spring, and the door swung wide.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of
her quarters.

A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending
marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's
wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway
that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet
Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty,
lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own
sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a
drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a
laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of
an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of
madly whinneying for its mother.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the
sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman
of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.

This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before,
because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that