Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/291

 the muscles of his arms. He retired, with a smile, to a still more distant plane. The regular did the work and the volunteer got the praise.

Mrs. Phillips presently gave up her drooping hold on the reluctant Cope and called Peter forward. "Is anything missing?" she asked.

"Only part of the breakfast, I expect," said Peter, with a grin. "And maybe some of the lunch. He surely was a hungry man!"

"Well, we sha'n't starve. See to all the doors and windows before you go back to bed."

But going back to bed was the one thing that she herself felt unable to do. She asked Carolyn to bring her a wrap of some kind or other, and sat down on the settle to talk it over. Cope had modestly slipped on a coat. The fire was dying—that was the only difference between twelve o'clock and ten.

"If I had known what was going to happen," declared Medora volubly, "I never could have gone to bed at all! And to think"—here she left Carolyn's end of the settle and drew nearer to Cope's—"that I should ever have even thought of coming out here without a man!"

She now rated her midnight intruder as a murderer, and believed more devoutly than ever that Cope had saved all their lives. Cope, who know that he had contributed nothing but a loud pair of lungs, began to feel rather foolish.

Nor did the anomalous situation commend itself in any degree to his taste. But it hit Medora Phillips' taste precisely, and she continued to sit there,