Page:Silver Shoal Light.djvu/368

344 "Hi! What sort of Maxim silencer did you attach to 'Bijah's old tub?" exclaimed Jim. "I didn't know the hilarity in here was high enough to cloak your arrival."

"I was so afraid you'd given it up entirely," Elspeth said.

She turned toward Joan, but a sentence of introduction died on her lips, because Joan's face was such a strange mixture of bewilderment, pleasure, and dawning wrath, that it held her silent. For the man who stood with his arm about Garth, gazing at Joan above the flickering candles, was no other than Robert Sinclair.

There followed ten minutes of cross-questioning which left every one but Sinclair gasping with amazement.

"How could I have guessed that you knew each other!" Elspeth said. "Oh, my brain is completely tangled up."

But Joan looked across at Sinclair, and her eyes demanded an explanation later that should satisfy her more thoroughly.

"And now," Sinclair said, "I demand the reason for the strange headgear of the men of the house?"