None of them realized it--hardly she herself.

She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead,
and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These
little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere
else.

"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was
tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the
natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs
and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to
cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"

"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with
the builder about it today."

He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice was
dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan.

She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such
occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety.

"No."

"Well, then, is it the--Sisters?"

"Not the Sisters. They were in last week."

"Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the
Benevolent Policemen?"