ld
maid--you sound like it."

"And no doubt you're a Methuselah with dyspepsia!"

Wallie smote the pillow gleefully--old Mr. Penrose's collection of
bottles and boxes and tablets for indigestion were a byword.

"We will see about this in the morning," said Mr. Penrose,
significantly. "I have been coming to this hotel for twenty-eight
years----"

"It's nothing to boast of," the voice interrupted. "I shouldn't, if I
had so little originality."

Mr. Penrose, seeming to realize that the woman would have the last word
if the dialogue lasted until morning, ended it with a loud snort of
derision.

He was so wrought up by the controversy that he was unable to compose
himself immediately, but lay awake for an hour framing a speech for Mr.
Cone, the proprietor, which was in the nature of an ultimatum. Either
the woman must move, or he would--but the latter he considered a remote
possibility, since he realized fully that a multi-millionaire, socially
well connected, is an asset which no hotel will dispense with lightly.

The frequency with which Mr. Penrose had presumed upon this knowledge
had much to do with Wallie's delight as he had listened to the
encounter.

Dropping back upon his pillow, the young man mildly wondered about the
woman next door to him. She must have come in on the evening train while
he was at the moving pictures, and retired immediately. Very likely she
was, as Mr. Penrose asserted, some acrimonious spinster, but, at any
rate, she had temporarily silenced the rich old tyrant of whom all the
hotel stood in awe.

A second time the ripping sound of yard after yard of calico being
viciously torn broke the night's stillness and, grinning, Wallie waited
to hear what the woman next door was going to do about it. But only a
stranger would have hoped to do anything about it, since to prevent Mr.
Penrose from snoring was a task only a little less hopeless than that of
stopping the roar of the ocean. Guests whom it annoyed had either to
move or get used to it. Sometimes they did the one and sometimes the
other, but always Mr. Penrose, who was the subject of a hundred
complaints a summer, snored on victoriously. The woman next door, of
course, could not know this, so no doubt she had a mistaken notion that
she might either break the old gentleman of his habit or have him
banished to an isolated quarter.

Wallie had not long to wait, for shortly after Mr. Penrose started again
the tattoo on the door was repe