milk bottles, saucepans, bread and crumbs and bread
knife encroaching upon a basket of spilled berries, egg shells and
melting bacon. The blue sides of the coffee-pot were stained where the
liquid and grounds had bubbled over it. Marthe was making toast, the
long fork jammed into a plate hole of the range. Mrs. Salisbury thought
that she had never seen sunlight so mercilessly hot and bright before--

"Rotten coffee!" said Mr. Salisbury cheerfully, when his wife took her
place at the table.

"And she NEVER uses the poacher!" Alexandra added reproachfully. "And
she says that the cream is sour because the man leaves it at half-past
four, right there in the sunniest corner of the porch--can't he have a
box or something, Mother?"

"Gosh, I wouldn't care what she did if she'd get a move on," said
Stanford frankly. "She's probably asleep out there, with her head in
the frying pan!"

Mrs. Salisbury went into the kitchen again. She had to pause in the
pantry because the bright squares of the linoleum, and the brassy
faucets, and the glare of the geraniums outside the window seemed to
rush together for a second.

Marthe was on the porch, exchanging a few gay remarks with the garbage
man before shutting the side door after him. The big stove was roaring
hot, a thick odor of boiling clothes showed that Marthe was ready for
her cousin Nancy, the laundress, who came once a week. A saucepan
deeply gummed with cereal was soaking beside the hissing and smoking
frying pan Mrs. Salisbury moved the frying pan, and the quick heat of
the coal fire rushed up at her face--

"Why," she whispered, opening anxious eyes after what seemed a long
time, "who fainted?"

A wheeling and rocking mass of light and shadow resolved itself into
the dining-room walls, settled and was still. She felt the soft
substance of a sofa pillow under her head, the hard lump that was her
husband's arm supporting her shoulders.

"That's it--now she's all right!" said Kane Salisbury, his kind,
concerned face just above her own. Mrs. Salisbury shifted heavy,
languid eyes, and found Sandy.

"Darling, you fell!" the daughter whispered. White-lipped, pitiful,
with tears still on her round cheeks, Sandy was fanning her mother with
a folded newspaper.

"Well, how silly of me!" Mrs. Salisbury said weakly. She sighed, tried
too quickly to sit up, and fainted quietly away again.

This time she opened her eyes in her own bed, and was made to drink
something sharp an