Page:Mary Rinehart - More Tish .djvu/249

 Rh  ; all the rest of it. Scandal, dear ladies! And absolute ruin to my hopes!"

"Bosh!" said Tish. But I could see that she was uncomfortable. "If there's trouble I'll send her our birth certificates. Besides, I thought you said the general was your brother-in-law?"

Aggie says he changed color at that but he said hastily: "By marriage, madam, only by marriage. By that I mean—I—he—the general is married to my brother."

"Really!" said Tish. "How unusual!"

She said afterward that she saw at once then that we were only wasting time, and that neither one of them would move hand or foot to get Charlie Sands back. Aggie had been scraping her skirt with a table knife, and was now fairly tidy, so Tish prepared to depart.

"On thinking it over," she said, "I realize that I am confronting a situation which requires brains rather than brute force. I shall therefore attend to it myself. Good night, colonel. I hope you find another duckboard. And—if you are writing home present my compliments to the general's husband. Come, Aggie."

At the top of the incline I looked back. The colonel was staring after us and wiping his forehead with a khaki handkerchief.

"You see," Tish said bitterly, "that is the sort