lowing her to the door.
"If you'll let me have your tissue-paper and the scissors, I'll show--"

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. "I wish--I wish you'd never speak to
me again!" she exclaimed, and Crosby dodged as though he were
apprehensive that she might beat him.

"It's so kind of you to go the very minute I ask," giggled Split,
gleefully.

But Sissy shut the door behind her on Crosby's woeful face and Split's
radiantly happy one, and went to her fate.

* * * * *

[Illustration:
"Of the design and construction of which he was quite
vain"]

Francis Madigan's room was his castle. It was his castle and his
workshop and his boudoir, his kitchen, his library, and his pantry in
one. The laxness of the family housekeeping had led him to distrust all
hands and heads but his own. Everything that he wanted, or that he might
want in the near future, he kept under his eyes, within reach of his
hands, where none might borrow or lose or destroy. In order to provide
for the needs which grew and changed daily, he fitted up rude shelf
above shelf, till the corners of the room were transformed into rough
bric-a-brac stands. Mr. Madigan had the unsuccessful man's pride in
trifling successes in amateur carpentering, in husbandry of any sort
unrelated to the real issues of his life; and every tool he needed for
the exercise of his skill he kept under lock and key. He believed in, he
trusted no Madigan. He had been known to lend his penknife to Sissy, but
that was when she was ailing long ago. He laid in supplies as though he
had inside information of a famine near at hand; and his pipes and his
great cans of tobacco were piled up with his cards and his books on the
table where he played solitaire all day and read half the night. The
sweets he liked occasionally, and the day's provision of fruit (for he
ate fruit only and at this time looked upon a vegetarian as a coarse
creature who belonged to a dead era), were packed in a small home-made
pantry of the design and construction of which he was quite vain. His
bed swathed in sheets; his blankets sewed securely together, as though
he feared they might escape; a device all his own of great wooden wedges
raising the lower end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level
with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters
called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all
sorts of odds and ends, t