If misfortunes do not come singly, as the proverb says, they seldom come illogically either. They are generally linked up by the chain of cause and effect. There is an accident or a false step and the rest follows inexorably. It is a sort of House that Jack Built of grief. We are caught under a rolling snowball of Fate.
Had Carmelita been in a mood to reason logically and anywhere near as much interested in the past as she was in the future she might have traced her present gathering storm of troubles around the drop of rain that Fate let fall when she innocently yielded to Rao-Singh's suggestion and risked a hundred of his dollars that first night at Canary Cottage. That was the beginning. And now—
The Carmelita who came down to breakfast in her Hedgewood home the morning after the disastrous plunge with Rao-Singh's five thousand dollar check at Canary Cottage was a different creature from the radiant Carmelita who had first come to Hedgewood. She toyed over her grapefruit listlessly. The wrens
