boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs. Spragg was easily induced to take the
same view, but Mr. Spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable
either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped.
After the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been
right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a
hotel as in one's own house; and Mrs. Spragg was therefore eager to have
him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under
the roof of the Stentorian.

"You see we were right to come here, Abner," she added, and he absently
rejoined: "I guess you two always manage to be right."

But his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and
lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or
three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his
wife.

"What's the matter--anything wrong down town?" she asked, her eyes
reflecting his anxiety.

Mrs. Spragg's knowledge of what went on "down town" was of the most
elementary kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she
had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly,
or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be
weathered.

He shook his head. "N--no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you
and Undine will go steady for a while." He paused and looked across the
room at his daughter's door. "Where is she--out?"

"I guess she's in her room, going over her dresses with that French
maid. I don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner,"
Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

Mr. Spragg smiled at last. "Well--I guess she WILL have," he said
prophetically.

He glanced again at his daughter's door, as if to make sure of its being
shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say:
"I saw Elmer Moffatt down town to-day."

"Oh, Abner!" A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs.
Spragg. Her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the
pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.

"Oh, Abner," she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter's door. Mr.
Spragg's black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident
that his anger was not against his wife.

"What's the good of Oh Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt's nothing to us--no
more'n if we never laid eyes on him."

"No--I know it; but what's he doing here? Did you speak to him