“Bed,” Dow perched on the railing of it, “was the only place you never did think of, Cassie. You never said a word about bed!”
“I told you he’d come here to the house! Oh, Bill, we’re so glad you like it. We’ve been simply wretched for ten days, haven’t we, Dow? We never set out to do this, Bill. It grew on us. And we never realized how far it had grown till we got the cable saying you were coming home— Did you have a good trip?” Leonidas shrugged.
“So-so. We nearly got bombed in the Mediterranean, and we nearly got bombed in the Baltic, and there was talk of our being annihilated in Singapore, but nothing came of it. Things have been much more exciting since I left New York— Cassie, where have you been, you two? I thought you’d come here at once.”
“We’ve been hunting you in hospitals,” Dow said. “We’ll probably all get measles. We wandered into a contagious ward, once.”
Leonidas wanted to know why.
“Oh, just after you skipped from the limousine— and a nice skip it was, too. Very neat. Anyway, just afterwards, there was an accident up at the four corners in Dalton Hills. A Birch Hill-Camavon bus turned over, and they told me that someone passing by had taken a man with a beard off to a hospital. Do you really like it? Honestly? You’re not mad? What do you think of the place, really?”
Leonidas told them, at some length.
“I feel reborn,” Dow said when he concluded. “I’ve lost ten pounds in the last month, and mother says I’ve worn a groove in the rugs from pacing around of nights, brooding over what we’d done. We didn’t mean to, Bill. It all started so—so innocently! I just happened to drop into Cassie’s.”
“I know,” Leonidas said. “I know.”
“You can’t know!” Cassie said. “It was the day after I got your cable saying to get the house plans from your lawyer, and tell the architect to start building, and all. And Dow dropped in, and he called the architect’s office, and he’d died. So I asked Dow if he couldn’t oversee things, and he said yes. And we liked your cottage, Bill. We really did. Did you notice how we kept the floor plan? Of course, we moved the living room, and swung out the ell for the boiler room, and added the terrace, and changed the levels, and the kitchen and dining room are different—”
“Otherwise,” Leonidas said, “it’s the same?”
“Well, we kept the linen closet at the head of the stairs,” Cassie said defensively. “That’s just where it was in your cottage. Really, we didn’t not like your cottage, Bill. But we got to looking at the hillside, and thinking, and then we thought of little changes here, and little changes there.”
Dow and Leonidas found themselves grinning at each other.
“I understand, Cassie,” Leonidas said. “And as far as I’m concerned, you need never mention that—er— that corny cottage again.”
“Isn’t that amazing!” Cassie said. “We all thought it was pretty corny, too. But of course, we’d never have said so in a million years. Anyway, the thing grew on us, and then we got scared, and I sent Dow over to New York to prepare you, and he went early because he had other business, and it was simply God’s grace that he spotted you while he was walking down to the train with Mike Clayton last night. Of course, he should have let me know then—”
“I had fifteen minutes,” Dow said, “to check out of the hotel and catch that train, Cassie, as I’ve told you and told you! I think it’s to my credit that I caught it.”
“You could have sent a telegram,” Cassie returned. “And then there wouldn’t have been all that nonsense at the station. There wouldn’t have been any nonsense at all, if you’d only kept your wits about you when he started talking about his dream house! But you lost your nerve and ran away!”
“Some of the nonsense was inevitable,” Leonidas said. “You see, Dow, after you ran away, a woman—”
“He bungled things, Bill,” Cassie said. “I should have gone to New York, myself. Look, have you thought of anything we forgot?”
“Just one. A sign to ward off peddlers. You can’t imagine how many peddlers and callers I’ve had. There was a brush man who sold me a carload lot of strange assorted brushes. And—”
“Didn’t you.find the talker?” Dow interrupted. “A round thing at the door, like a tea-strainer. Well, you press a button, and chat with the person on the doorstep before you let ‘em in. It’s great fun. Cassie sassed the bishop and made a date with the vegetable man. Come on down, and we’ll demonstrate.”
“I wish,” Leonidas said as they trooped downstairs, “that you’d demonstrate the brushes. They all seemed so logical when that man showed them to me, but there’s one squiggly worm of a thing with a curved handle that’s been worrying me ever since the fellow left. I can’t imagine what you’d do with such a diabolical object.”
“Is it like this?” Cassie made motions. “With a sort of dent right along in here? Oh, I’ve got one of those. They’re marvelous. That’s what we fish Jock’s kites from phone wires with. And there’s another like it, only not so squiggly. It’s called a Senior Bath Aid, but we use it to spread food over the pool for the goldfish. Let me see the rest, Bill. Where are they?” Leonidas pointed to the closet, and Cassie opened the door.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, my! Oh, dear!”
“I know I got too many, but he was such an efficient salesman, I never realized what an accumulation—”
“These hampers!” Cassie said in agonized tones. “Bill, has Estelle Otis been here already? She has! Oh dear me!”
“She came with some lady judge,” Leonidas said. “And, while I think to ask, is it possible that Estelle
