``You mean this punk can brush me aside and I've got to hold still for it?''

``I held still for the same thing, didn't I? I'm helping you now, am I not? Now look, there's work to be done and lots of it. The Boss wants performance, not gripes. If you need a Day off to calm down, duck over to the Muslim Paradise and take it. Otherwise, straighten your halo, square your wings, and dig in. The sooner you act like an angel the quicker you'll feel angelic. Get Happy, junior!''

Digby heaved a deep ethereal sigh. ``Okay, I'm Happy. Where do I start?''

Jubal did not hear of Digby's disappearance when it was announced, and, when he did, while he had a fleeting suspicion, he dismissed it; if Mike had had a finger in it, he had gotten away with it -- and what happened to supreme bishops worried Jubal not at all as long as he wasn't bothered.

His household had gone through an upset. Jubal deduced what had happened but did not know with whom -- and didn't want to inquire. Mike was of legal age and presumed able to defend himself in the clinches. Anyhow, it was high time the boy was salted.

Jubal couldn't reconstruct the crime from the way the girls behaved because patterns kept shifting -- ABC vs D, then BCD vs A & & & or AB vs CD, or AD vs CB, through all ways that four women can gang up on each other.

This continued most of the week following that ill-starred trip to church, during which period Mike stayed in his room and usually in a trance so deep that Jubal would have pronounced him dead had he not seen it before. Jubal would not have minded it if service had not gone to pieces. The girls seemed to spend half their time tiptoeing in ``to see if Mike was all right'' and they were too preoccupied to cook, much less be secretaries. Even rock-steady Anne -- Hell, Anne was the worst! Absent-minded, subject to unexplained tears. Jubal would have bet his life that if Anne were to witness the Second Coming, she would memorize date, time, personae, events, and barometric pressure without batting her calm blue eyes.