he roared again. "I'd just like to see 'em!"

Esther wept harder. "Oh, I wish they would; I ought to give 'em up. I
didn't care for them after I thought--that. It was just that I had to
have something I wouldn't let go, and I tried to think only of saving
the table for the water-set."

"Come mighty near bein' no water-set," muttered Jonas to himself; then
he turned to his companion. "Young man, I guess they don't need us no
more," he said.

When he regained his sister-in-law's, he encountered that lady carrying
a steaming dish. Guests stood about under the trees or sat at the long
tables.

"For mercy sakes, Jonas, have you seen Esther? She made fuss enough
about havin' that dove fixed up in the parlor, and she and Joe ain't
stood under it a minit yet."

"That's a fact," chuckled the old fellow. "They ain't stood under no
dove of peace yet; they're just about ready to now, I reckon."

* * * * *

And up through the lane, all oblivious, the lovers were walking slowly.
Just before they reached the gap in the wall, they paused by common
consent. Cherry and apple trees drooped over the wall; these had ceased
blossoming, but a tangle of wild-rose bushes was all ablush. It dropped
a thick harvest of petals on the ground. Joe bent his head; and Esther,
resting against his shoulder, lifted her eyes to his face. All
unconsciously she took the pose of the woman in the Frohman poster. They
kissed, and then went on slowly.

Cordelia's Night of Romance

BY JULIAN RALPH

Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, "to keep a
date" with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her
home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the
shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch
Johnny's signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the
street doorway. Presently she heard another call--a birdlike
whistle--and she knew which boy's note it was, and which girl it called
out of her home for a sidewalk stroll. She smiled, a trifle sadly, and
yet triumphantly. She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and
looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys
of the neighborhood as if there were no others.

She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only
two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light.
The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of wh