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chop with appetite.
    During the flight Aggie, Hannah and I remained in the open, looking up, and I must admit that it was a nervous time for us, seeing our dear Tish head down above the earth, and engaged in other life-imperiling exploits. But she came down smiling and, when the aeroplane stopped, spoke cheerfully.
    “A marvelous experience,” she observed. “One feels akin to the birds. One soars, and loses memory of earth.”
    She was then helped out, but owing to the recent altitude her knees refused to support her, and she sank to the ground.

VI
    T HERE WERE, OF COURSE , occasional misadventures. There was that terrible day, for instance, when Tish hung from a bridge by her hands, ready to drop to a train beneath, when through some mistake the train was switched to another track and our dear Letitia was left hanging, like Mohammed’s coffin, between heaven and earth. And that other day, of wretched memory, when on exploding the hillside to imprison the governor, a large stone flew up and struck Aggie violently in the mouth, dislodging her upper plate and almost strangling her.
    There was, again, the time when the smugglers set fire to the building Tish was in, and the fire department did not receive its signal and failed to arrive until almost too late.
    But in the main, things went very well. There were peaceful days when Aggie and I fed peanuts to the little studio elephant, Katie, and indeed became quite friendly with Katie, who dragged certain heavy articles about the lot and often roamed at will, her harness chains dangling. And there were hot days when we sought the shelter of the cool hangar which housed the smugglers’ dirigible, or baby blimp as it was called, and where we had concealed several bottles of blackberry cordial against emergency.
    At such times we frequently discussed what Aggie now termed the Macmanus mystery. For such it had become.
    “He’s not hanging around for any good purpose, Lizzie,” Aggie frequently observed. “He’s in Tish’s picture somehow, and—I think he is a lover!”
    We had not mentioned him to Tish, but on the next day after she took her parachute leap we learned that she had her own suspicions about him.
    I may say here, before continuing with my narrative, that Tish’s parachute experience was without accident, although not without incident. She was to leap with the bag of stage money she had captured in the air from the smugglers, and this she did. But a gust of wind caught her, and it was our painful experience to see her lifted on the gale and blown out of sight toward the mountains.
    Several automobiles and the dirigible immediately started after her, but dusk fell and she had not returned to us. Even now I cannot picture those waiting hours without emotion. At one moment we visualized her sitting on some lonely mountain crag, and at another still floating on, perhaps indefinitely, a lonely bit of flotsam at the mercy of the elements.
    At nine o’clock that night, however, she returned, slightly irritable but unhurt.
    “For heaven’s sake, Aggie,” she said briskly, “stop sneezing and crying, and order me some supper. I’ve been sitting in a ranch house, with a nervous woman pointing a gun at me, for three hours.”
    It developed that she had landed in the country, and had untied the parachute and started with her valise full of stage money back toward the studio, but that she had stopped to ask for supper at a ranch, and the woman there had looked in the bag while Tish was washing, and had taken her for a bank robber.
    “If she had ever looked away,” Tish said, “I could have grabbed the gun. But she was cross-eyed, and I don’t know yet which eye she watched with.”
    As I have said, it was the next day that we learned that Tish herself had grown suspicious about Mr. Macmanus.
    She sent for us to come to her dressing room, and when we appeared she said, “I want you both here for a few minutes. Light a cigarette, Hannah. Mr. Stein’s