arded him sharply, with a new attention to the hidden eyes.

"Say, are you blind?" he asked.

"Blind as a bat! Can't see my hand before my face."

The horrified judge stalked to the door.

"You hear that?" he called in, but only the parrot heeded him.

"Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!" it screeched.

Winona and her mother came to the door. They had been absent for a brief
cry.

"What she could ever see in me," Spike was repeating--"a pretty girl
like that!"

"Pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" screamed
the parrot.

Its concluding laugh was evil with irony. Winona sped to the cage,
regarding her old pet with dismay. She glanced back at Spike.

"Smart birdie, all right, all right," called Spike. "He knows her."

"Pretty girl, pretty girl!" Again came the derisive guffaw.

Never had Polly's sarcasm been so biting. Winona turned a murderous
glance from it and looked uneasily back at her man.

"Dinner's on," called Mrs. Penniman.

"I'm having one of my bad days," groaned the judge. "Don't feel as if I
could eat a mouthful."

But he was merely insuring that he could be the first to leave the table
plausibly. He intended that the apparent misunderstanding about the
wicker chair should have been but a thing of the moment, quickly past
and forgotten.

"Why, what's the trouble with you, Father?" asked Winona in the tone of
one actually seeking information.

The judge shot her a hurt look. It was no way to address an invalid of
his standing.

"Chow, Spike," said Wilbur, and would have guided him, but Winona was
lightly before him.

Dave Cowan followed them from the little house.

"Present me to His Highness," said he, after kneeling to kiss the hand
of Winona.

* * * * *

The mid-afternoon hours beheld Spike Brennon again strangely occupying
the wicker porch chair. He even wielded the judge's very own palm-leaf
fan as he sat silent, sniffing at intervals toward the yellow rose. Once
he was seen to be moving his hand, with outspread fingers, before his
face.

Winona had maneuvered her father from the chair, nor had she the grace
to veil her subterfuge after she lured him to the back of the house. She
merely again had wished to know what, in plain terms, his ailment was;
what, for that matter, had been the trouble with him for twenty years.
The judge fell speechless with dismay.

"You eat well and you sleep well, and you're well nourished" we