in the company of four strange men.”

“Why, old dear,” laughed Charmian, “two of them are not strangers at all.”

“What two are not, please?”

“Doctor Inman Shonto is known all over the United States and Europe,” Charmian pointed out. “And Mr. Jerome is his friend. What better recommendation could one ask for, Mary Temple?”

“There will be four men, and only two women,” Mary told her. “And it’s—it’s all but downright indecent.”

“Two women?”

“Certainly. You are one, and I am one.”

“Oh, you mean to go, too, then? I thought you would return to San Francisco and wait there for me.”

“If you persist in going into that boneyard country, Charmian, I am going with you. And that ends that.”

“Well, goodness knows you’re welcome, Mary Temple,”[41] laughed Charmian. “But I didn’t for a minute imagine that you would care to go.”

[41]

“I don’t,” snapped Mary Temple. “But that’s not saying I’m not going. And there must be two more women in the party.”

“Oh, Mary Temple! What a prig you are! Do you want to pair us off?”

“Common decency demands that there be as many women as there are men,” declared Mary.

“We might take my wife along,” Smith Morley put in. “She’s in Los Angeles now. She could meet us at ——. Well, I’ll arrange that. But Leach hasn’t a wife—yet. Wouldn’t three women do, Miss Temple? Another person would make the two machines pretty full, you know. We’ll have a world of baggage to pile in the tonneaus and lash on the running-boards.”

“What is your wife like?” demanded Mary Temple unfeelingly.

“Why, Mary Temple! What an impertinent question!” cried Charmian.

“Impertinent or not,” barked Mary, “I want to know what his wife is like before I give my consent.”

Morley only laughed and showed no resentment. “Why, she’s a pretty good old girl,” he told her. “She’s a good housewife, not bad looking, a good dresser when I’m in 

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