dusty car drawn up under the porte-cochère. On the steps was a heap of luggage. A chauffeur stood by the car, stretching his putteed legs, and smoking a furtive cigarette; the machine’s bulk between him and the porch.

In the tonneau lolled a fat and asthmatic-looking old German police dog.

On the veranda, in two wicker chairs drawn forward from their wonted places, lolled a man and a woman swathed in yellow dust-coats. The man was enormous, paunchy, pendulous, sleek. The woman was small and dark and acerb. They were chatting airily, as Vail and Doris drew near.

In front of them wavered Vogel, the butler, trying to get in a word edgewise, as they talked. Back of the doorway, in the hall, could be seen the shadowy forms of the second man and a capped maid, listening avidly.

At sight of Thaxton, the butler abandoned his vain effort to interrupt the strangers and came[64] in ponderous haste down the stone steps and across the lawn to meet his employer.

[64]

“Excuse me, sir,” began Vogel, worriedly, “but might I speak to you a minute?”

Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied front veranda a wide berth.

“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is it? And who are those people?”

For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.

“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not people.”

Without listening to the distinction, Thaxton Vail was scanning the cards. He read, half aloud:

“Mr. Joshua Q. Mosely.” Then, “Mrs. Joshua Q. Mosely, 222 River Front Terrace, ... Tuesdays until Lent.”

“Interesting, if true. I should say, offhand, it ought to count them about three, decimal five,” gravely commented Vail. “But it’s nothing in my young life. I don’t know them.”

[65]“No, sir,” agreed Vogel. “You would not be likely to, sir. Nobody would. They are persons. Most peculiar persons, too. I think they are a bit jiggled, sir, if I might say so. 

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