he said, "what's the news downstairs?"

"That's what I came to tell you," she informed him, grimly.

Adams lowered his newspaper to his knee and peered over his spectacles
at her. She had remained by the door, standing, and the great greenish
shadow of the small lamp-shade upon his table revealed her but
dubiously. "Isn't everything all right?" he asked. "What's the matter?"

"Don't worry: I'm going to tell you," she said, her grimness not
relaxed. "There's matter enough, Virgil Adams. Matter enough to make me
sick of being alive!"

With that, the markings on his brows began to emerge again in all their
sharpness; the old pattern reappeared. "Oh, my, my!" he lamented. "I
thought maybe we were all going to settle down to a little peace for a
while. What's it about now?"

"It's about Alice. Did you think it was about ME or anything for
MYSELF?"

Like some ready old machine, always in order, his irritability responded
immediately and automatically to her emotion. "How in thunder could I
think what it's about, or who it's for? SAY it, and get it over!"

"Oh, I'll 'say' it," she promised, ominously. "What I've come to ask you
is, How much longer do you expect me to put up with that old man and his
doings?"

"Whose doings? What old man?"

She came at him, fiercely accusing. "You know well enough what old man,
Virgil Adams! That old man who was here the other night."

"Mr. Lamb?"

"Yes; 'Mister Lamb!'" She mocked his voice. "What other old man would I
be likely to mean except J. A. Lamb?"

"What's he been doing now?" her husband inquired, satirically. "Where'd
you get something new against him since the last time you----"

"Just this!" she cried. "The other night when that man was here, if I'd
known how he was going to make my child suffer, I'd never have let him
set his foot in my house."

Adams leaned back in his chair as though her absurdity had eased his
mind. "Oh, I see," he said. "You've just gone plain crazy. That's the
only explanation of such talk, and it suits the case."

"Hasn't that man made us all suffer every day of our lives?" she
demanded. "I'd like to know why it is that my life and my children's
lives have to be sacrificed to him?"

"How are they 'sacrificed' to him?"

"Because you keep on working for him! Because you keep on letting him
hand out whatever miserable little pittance he chooses to give you;
that's why! It's as if he were some horrible old Juggernaut and I had to
see my chi