don't claim her, she'll stay on here with me."

"Hum. Bravo.... About two weeks," said Maltby Phar.

THE SECOND CHAPTER

I

IT was not Susan who left me at the end of two weeks; it was Mrs.
Parrot. Maltby had departed within three days, hastening perforce to
editorial duties in New York. He then edited, with much furtive groaning
to sympathetic friends, the _Garden Exquisite_, a monthly magazine _de
luxe_, devoted chiefly to advertising matter, and to photographs
taken--by request of far-seeing wives and daughters--at the country
clubs and on the country estates of our minor millionaires. For a
philosophical anarch, rather a quaint occupation! Yet one must live....
Maltby, however, had threatened a return as soon as possible, "to look
over the piteous _debacle_." There was no probability that Mrs. Parrot
would ever return.

"You cannot expect me," maintained Mrs. Parrot, "to wait on the child of
a murdering suicide. Especially," she added, "when he was nothing but a
common sort of man to begin with. I'm as sorry for that poor little
creature as anybody in New Haven; but there are places for such."

That was her ultimatum. My reply was two weeks' notice, and a
considerable monetary gift to soften the blow.

Hillhouse Avenue, in general, so far as I could discover, rather
sympathized with Mrs. Parrot. She at once obtained an excellent post,
becoming housekeeper for the Misses Carstairs, spinster sisters of
incredible age, who lived only two doors from me in a respectable
mansion whose portico resembled an Egyptian tomb. Wandering freshmen
from the Yale campus frequently mistook it for the home office of one of
the stealthier secret societies.

There, silently ensconced, Mrs. Parrot burned with a hard, gemlike
flame, and awaited my final downfall. So did the Misses Carstairs, who,
being cousins of my wife, had remained firmly in opposition. And rumor
had it that other members of neighboring families were suffering
discomfort from the proximity of Susan. It was as if a tiny, almost
negligible speck of coal dust had blown into the calm, watchful eye of
the _genius loci_, and was gradually inflaming it--with resultant
nervous irritation to all its members.

Susan was happily unconscious of these things. Her gift of intuition had
not yet projected itself into that ethereal region which conserves the
more tenuous tone and the subtler distinction--denominate "society." For
the immediate moment she was bounded