lity.

They explored the Cape for miles around, looking for a place where they
might open a tea-room if they did decide to do so. They said good-by to
the Tubbses and returned to New York, to the noisy streets and the
thankless drudgery at Pilkings & Son's.

In December they definitely made up their minds to give up the shoe
business, take their few hundred dollars from the bank, and, the coming
summer, open a tea-room in an old farm-house on the Cliffs at Grimsby
Head, Cape Cod.

Out of saving money for the tea-room, that winter, the Applebys had as
much fun as they had ever found in spending. They were comrades,
partners in getting along without things as they had been partners in
working to acquire little luxuries. They went to the movies only once a
month--that made the movies only the more thrilling! On the morning
before they were to go Father would pound softly on the pillow by
Mother's head and sing, "Wake up! It's a fine day and we're going to see
a photoplay to-night!"

Mother did without her chocolate peppermints, and Father cut his smoking
down to one cigarette after each meal--though occasionally, being but a
mortal man, he would fall into sinful ways and smoke up three or four
cigarettes while engaged in an enthralling conversation regarding Mr.
Pilkings's meanness with fellow-clerks at lunch at the Automat.
Afterward he would be very repentant; he would have a severe case of
conviction of sin, and Mother would have to comfort him when he accused
himself:

"Seems as if I couldn't doggone never learn to control myself. I ain't
hopeless, am I? I declare, I'm disgusted with myself when I think of
your going without your chocolates and me just making a profane old
razorback hog of myself."

There was no sordidness in their minute economy; no chill of poverty;
they were saving for an excursion to paradise. They crowed as they
thought of the beauty of their discovery: lonely Grimsby Head, where the
sea stretched out on one side of their house and moors on the other,
with the State road and its motorists only two hundred feet from their
door. Though they should live in that sentinel house for years, never
would they enjoy it more than they now did in anticipation when they sat
of an evening in their brown flat, looking down on a delicatessen, a
laundry, and a barber-shop, and planned to invest in their house of
accomplished dreams the nickels they were managing to save.

The only thing that worried Fathe