more than all the rest of the world put together.
Don't talk to me like that. But I can't touch your money, truly, dear, I
can't; so don't ask me."

"Idiot," cried Dorothy, with tears raining down her face, "don't you know
I'd go with you if you had to grind an organ in the street, and collect
the money for you in a tin cup till we got enough for a monkey? What kind
of a dinky little silver-plated wedding present do you think I am, anyway?
You----"

The rest of it was sobbed out, incoherently enough, on his hitherto
immaculate shirt-front. "You don't mind," she whispered, "if I cry down
your neck, do you?"

"If you're going to cry," he answered, his voice trembling, "this is the
one place for you to do it, but I don't want you to cry."

"I won't, then," she said, wiping her eyes on a wet and crumpled
handkerchief. In a time astonishingly brief to one hitherto unfamiliar
with the lachrymal function, her sobs had ceased.

"You've made me cry nearly a quart since morning," she went on, with
assumed severity, "and I hope you'll behave so well from now on that I'll
never have to do it again. Look here."

She led him to the window, where a pair of robins were building a nest in
the boughs of a maple close by. "Do you see those birds?" she demanded,
pointing at them with a dimpled, rosy forefinger.

"Yes, what of it?"

"Well, they're married, aren't they?"

"I hope they are," laughed Harlan, "or at least engaged."

"Who's bringing the straw and feathers for the nest?" she asked.

"Both, apparently," he replied, unwillingly.

"Why isn't she rocking herself on a bough, and keeping her nails nice, and
fixing her feathers in the latest style, or perhaps going off to some fool
bird club while he builds the nest by himself?"

"Don't know."

"Nor anybody else," she continued, with much satisfaction. "Now, if she
happened to have two hundred and twelve feathers, of the proper size and
shape to go into that nest, do you suppose he'd refuse to touch them, and
make her cry because she brought them to him?"

"Probably he wouldn't," admitted Harlan.

There was a long silence, then Dorothy edged up closer to him. "Do you
suppose," she queried, "that Mr. Robin thinks more of his wife than you do
of yours?"

"Indeed he doesn't!"

"And still, he's letting her help him."

"But----"

"Now, listen, Harlan. We've got a house, with more than enough furniture
to make it comfortable, though it's not the kind of furniture ei