Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/32

 tenaciously and smokily above her, while I perforce brought up the rear of this weird caravan, moaning unhappily to myself, and grimly determined to leave neither of them out of my sight if it killed me.

But the sensibilities of even the most modest would never have been wounded.

In the cottage, Connie merely slit a hole in a blanket, slipped it enshroudingly over her shoulders so that only her head protruded, and demurely proceeded to change her clothes within the shelter of its enveloping folds.

"Shucks!" said the djinn sulkily.

It had been shameful of me to suspect for even a moment that I couldn't trust Connie. Scarcely containing my relief, I went to change my own clothes. When I came out of the bedroom, dressed in slacks and sport shirt, Connie suggested we go down to the hotel dining room for dinner.

It wasn't much of a place, and Duncan Hines would certainly never recommend it, but as the French say, what would you? It was impossible to cook dinner in the cottage for, as Connie pointed out, the djinn was large and the cottage was small, and as a result he seemed to fill the place with smoke and fog.

"What do you think he's going to do to the hotel dining room?" I wondered.

"Don't cross your bridges until they're hatched," Connie said gayly.

"But how are we ever going to explain the djinn?" I wanted to know.

"'Who excuses, accuses,'" Connie quoted airily. "We simply won't say a word about him. We can recognize him because we let him out of the bottle, but to anyone else he'll just look like a mass of smoke or fog, for you'll have to concede that he isn't very shapely."

"Is that so!" roared the djinn, stung.

"So you see?" Connie said, ignoring his hurt. "We don't have to know any more about it than anyone else, do we?"

This was true enough, so I made no further demur.

Still and all, I'm afraid our entrance into the dining room was as unobtrusive as a platinum blonde at an Abyssinian hoe-down.

People started coughing and gasping, and waving their hands in front of their faces, trying futilely to dispel the gray vapor that filled the place and seemed willfully bent upon choking them.

"Did you ever see such a fog?" they kept asking each other. They even asked us, thus confirming us in our belief that they suspected nothing.

I daresay we looked, to the naked eye, like a perfectly normal young couple, though closely accompanied by a persistent and overhanging thunder-cloud. However, its proximity to us, while mystifying, seemed to arouse no suspicion among the others.

We settled ourselves at a table, and looked about us, and I must confess that our hearts sank.

Connie regarded with a lacklustre eye the sagging walls, the splintered floor, the dirty streamers hanging from the ceiling in a ghastly travesty of gaiety. The orchestra, if such it could be called by courtesy, made weirdly unrecognizeable sounds and wheezings that only assailed the ear-drums, and the few couples circling the floor in some grisly gavotte of their own devising could best be described by saying that they were both elderly and unprepossessing.

Through the open French doors, flowers and vines had withered in the boxes allegedly decorating the dilapidated terrace, and the dusk outside seemed alien and unfriendly. Even the sea looked gray and sullen, and now that the sun had gone down, the sky was only a shade lighter than the water.

No setting for romance, this.

"Oh, I wish there was a beautiful moon, at least," Connie said wistfully, sighing. "A honeymoon, Pete, just for us."

It hung in the sky immediately, a great golden ball.

Connie apparently didn't see it at once, for her face was rapt with the picture she was blissfully regarding in her mind's eye. She went on, "And I wish these people were all young and handsome and beautifully dressed—"

They were. At once.

"—dancing to the strains of a wonderful orchestra—"