e of Newbern's
best-known business men.

Later he contented himself with observing Lyman Teaford at Niagara
Falls. The fatuous groom stood heedlessly at the cataract's verge. There
was a simple push, and the world was suddenly a better place to live in.
As for his bereaved mate--he meditated her destruction, also, but this
was too summary. It came to him that she had been a lovely and helpless
victim of circumstances. For he had stayed on with Spike through the
evening, and in a dearth of custom Spike, back of the bar, had sung in a
whining tenor, "For she's only a bird in a gilded cage----"

That was it. She had discarded him because he was penniless--had sold
herself to be a rich man's toy. She would pay for it in bitter anguish.

"Only a bird in a gilded cage," sang Spike again. An encore had been
urged.

At noon the following day Winona Penniman, a copy of the _Advance_
before her, sat at the Penniman luncheon table staring dully into a dish
of cold rice pudding. She had read again and again the unbelievable
item. At length she snapped her head, as Spike Brennon would when now
and again a clean blow reached his jaw, pushed the untouched dessert
from her with a gesture of repugnance, and went aloft to her own little
room. Here she sat at her neat desk of bird's eye maple, opened her
journal, and across a blank page wrote in her fine, firm hand, "What
Life Means to Me."

It had seemed to her that it meant much. She would fill many pages. The
name of Lyman Teaford would not there appear, yet his influence would be
continuously present. She was not stricken as had been another reader of
that fateful bit of news. But she was startled, feeling herself
perilously cast afloat from old moorings. She began bravely and easily,
with a choice literary flavour.

"My sensations may be more readily imagined than described."

This she found true. She could imagine them readily, but could not, in
truth, describe them. She was shocked to discern that for the first time
in her correct life there were distinctly imagined sensations which she
could not bring herself to word, even in a volume forever sacred to her
own eyes. A long time she sat imagining. At last she wrote, but the
words seemed so petty.

All apparently that life meant to her was "How did she do it?"

She stared long at this. Then followed, as if the fruit of her further
meditation: "There is a horrid bit of slang I hear from time to
time--can it be that I need