quite wore himself out. Then
he sat down at the window and let the far-away look slip back into his
troubled blue eyes. They began to smart, but he did not blink them.

Phoebe found him there at four when she came in for her nap. He
promised to play croquet with her.

Dinner was served promptly that evening, and it was the best dinner
Bridget had cooked in a month.

"That little talk of mine did some good," said he to himself, as he
selected a toothpick and went in to read "Nicholas Nickleby" till
bedtime. "They can't fool with me."

He was reading Dickens. His wife had given him a complete set for
Christmas. To keep him occupied, she said.

CHAPTER II

MISS NELLIE DULUTH

Nellie Duluth had an apartment up near the Park, the upper end of the
Park, in fact, and to the east of it. She went up there, she said, so
that she could be as near as possible to her husband and daughter.
Besides, she hated taking the train at the Grand Central on Sundays.
She always went to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street in her electric
brougham. It didn't seem so far to Tarrytown from One Hundred and
Twenty-fifth. In making her calculations Nellie always went through
the process of subtracting forty-two from one-twenty-five, seldom
correctly. She had no difficulty in taking the two from the five, but
it wasn't so simple when it came to taking four from two with one to
carry over. It was the one that confused her. For the life of her she
couldn't see what became of it. Figures of that sort were not in her
line.

Nellie's career had been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the
chorus into the role of principal comedienne--one of those pranks of
fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the
"Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening
night, when the lid of her box flew open and she was projected into
plain view, she lost her bearings and missed the tiny platform in
coming down. To save herself from an ignominious tumble almost to the
footlights she hopped off the edge of her box, where she had been
"teetering" helplessly, and did a brief but exceedingly graceful
little "toe spin," hopping back into the box an instant later with all
the agility of a scared rabbit. She expected "notice" from the stage
manager for her inexcusable slip.

But the spectators liked it. They thought it was in the play. She was
so pretty, so sprightly, so graceful, and so astoundingly modest that
they wa