ooped up in a slushy, snowy New
England city--when all the bright, gorgeous, rose-blooming South
was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was
only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like
Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of
serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia
among the score of freer-mannered girls of his acquaintance?"

Glumly reverting to his morning paper, he began to read and reread
with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news--each
gibbering advertisement.

At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in
the door, but the plainly discernible green one-cent stamp forbade any
possible hope that it was a letter from the South. At four o'clock
again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the
letter-slide. At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up
perfectly tight and muffled his ears in the pillow so that he would
not even know whether the postman came or not. The only thing that
finally roused him to plain, grown-up sense again was the joggle of
the janitor's foot kicking mercilessly against the bed.

"Here's your supper," growled the janitor.

On the bare tin tray, tucked in between the cup of gruel and the slice
of toast loomed an envelope--a real, rather fat-looking envelope.
Instantly from Stanton's mind vanished every conceivable sad thought
concerning Cornelia. With his heart thumping like the heart of any
love-sick school girl, he reached out and grabbed what he supposed was
Cornelia's letter.

But it was post-marked, "Boston"; and the handwriting was quite
plainly the handwriting of The Serial-Letter Co.

Muttering an exclamation that was not altogether pretty he threw the
letter as far as he could throw it out into the middle of the floor,
and turning back to his supper began to crunch his toast furiously
like a dragon crunching bones.

At nine o'clock he was still awake. At ten o'clock he was still awake.
At eleven o'clock he was still awake. At twelve o'clock he was still
awake.... At one o'clock he was almost crazy. By quarter past one, as
though fairly hypnotized, his eyes began to rivet themselves on the
little bright spot in the rug where the "serial-letter" lay gleaming
whitely in a beam of electric light from the street. Finally, in one
supreme, childish impulse of petulant curiosity, he scrambled
shiveringly out of his b