elter.

"Did you find anything, Fred?" Edith asked. Fred did not reply, so she
repeated the question with some emphasis.

"Eh--what?" Fred inquired, peering around the corner of the paper.

"Did--you--find--any--clue?"

"Yes, dear--that is, no. Nothing to amount to anything. Upon my soul,
Jack, if I wrote the editorials of this paper, I'd _say_ something." He
subsided into inarticulate growls behind the paper, and everything was
quiet. Then I heard a sniffle, distinctly. I looked up. Edith was
crying--pouring cream into a coffee cup, and feeling blindly for the
sugar, with her pretty face twisted and her pretty eyes obscured. In a
second I was up, had crumpled the newspapers, including Fred's, into a
ball, and had lifted him bodily out of his chair.

"When I am married," I said fiercely, jerking him around to Edith and
pushing him into a chair beside her, "if I ever read the paper at
breakfast when my wife is bursting for conversation, may I have some
good and faithful friend who will bring me back to a sense of my duty."
I drew a chair to Edith's other side. "Now, let's talk," I said.

She wiped her eyes shamelessly with her table napkin. "There isn't a
soul in this house I can talk to," she wailed. "All kinds of awful
things happening--and we had to send for coffee this morning, Jack. You
must have used four pounds last night--and nobody will tell me a thing.
There's no use asking Margery--she's sick at her stomach from the
chloroform--and Ellen never talks except about herself, and she's
horribly--uninteresting. And Fred and you make a ba--barricade out of
newspapers, and fire 'yes' at me when you mean 'no.'"

"I put the coffee back where I got it, Edith," I protested stoutly. "I
know we're barbarians, but I'll swear to that." And then I stopped, for
I had a sudden recollection of going up-stairs with something fat and
tinny in my arms, of finding it in my way, and of hastily thrusting it
into the boys' boot closet under the nursery stair.

Fred had said nothing. He had taken her hand and was patting it gently,
the while his eye sought the head-lines on the wad of morning paper.

"You burned that blue rug," she said to me disconsolately, with a threat
of fresh tears. "It took me ages to find the right shade of blue."

"I will buy you that Shirvan you wanted," I hastened to assure her.

"Yes, to take away when you get married." There is a hint of the shrew
in all good women.

"I will buy the Shirvan and _