take care of this place was apparently on the job. Kenwick resolved to be on the alert for the egg-hunter. In twenty minutes he had cooked himself an ample breakfast and carried it into the dining-room on an impressive silver tray. Memories of long-ago camping trips with his elder brother in the Adirondacks recurred to him as he ate. Everett was a master camper but had always hated to cook. In order to even things he had been willing to do much more than his share of the rougher work. Now as Kenwick drank his coffee and ate the perfectly browned toast and fluffy eggs, he blessed those camping trips and the education which they had given him.

And then his memory wandered from the wholesome sanity of those days to the first dreadful months of the war. From the chaos of that era, one night leaped out at him. It was the night that he had parted with Everett at the old Kenwick house, the house that had been the Kenwicks' for sixty years. Perhaps the stark simplicity of that scene, shorn of objective emotion by the presence of Everett's wife, was the very thing that enabled him now to extricate it from the tangle of days that preceded and followed it. Everett had laid his hand for just an instant upon the shoulder of the new uniform. "I'm all you've got to see you off, boy," he had said. "But if mother and dad could see you now they'd be proud and happy." And then had followed a sentence or two of promise, of affection, of admonition, murmured in a hasty undertone intended to escape the ears of the statuesque creature who was his brother's wife. Kenwick had wondered afterward whether they had escaped her, whether, anything vital ever escaped Isabel Kenwick. And yet his farewell to her had been a flawless scene. She was always the central figure in some flawless scene. His brother's whole life seemed to him to be enacted upon a perfectly appointed stage. There had been just the proper proportion of regret and pride in Isabel's voice as she bade him good-by; just the right waving to him from the steps and calling after him that whenever he returned his old room would be waiting with everything just as he left it.

And then he had come back and not found his room the same at all. Everything about the house seemed changed. His room was a guestroom now, and he had been relegated to a place on the third floor with dormer-windows. He hated dormer-windows. When his mother had been head of the home the third floor had been used only for the servants, but under Isabel's régime it had been converted into extra guestrooms, and there seemed to be a never-ending succession of guests.

So it had been no hardship to acquiesce in 

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