to cook it for herself and
everybody said she could fry chicken something grand. So he chose fried
chicken.

He was so overjoyed that it was hard for him to be as solemn about the
house as he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had
been taken suddenly and violently ill. Eddie was the natural heir to the
old man's fortune.

Uncle Loren was considered close in a town where extravagance was almost
impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous
wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything
but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old
miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem,
Limited. He was frightened immeasurably.

In his youth he had joined the Campbellite church and had been baptized
in the town pond when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor
had to break with a stick before he immersed Loren. Everybody said the
crust of ice had stuck to his heart ever since.

In the panic that came on him now he craftily decided to transfer all
his savings to the other shore. The factory, of course, he must leave
behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to the
Campbellite church under conditions that he counted on to gain him a
high commercial rating in heaven.

Over his shoulder, as he wrote, a shadow waited, grinning; and the old
man had hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his
pillow-slip when the grisly hand was laid on his shoulders and Uncle
Loren was no longer there.

II

His uncle's demise cut Eddie out of the picnic with Luella; but she was
present at the funeral and gave him a wonderful smile. Uncle Loren's
final will was not discovered until the pillow-slip was sent to the
wash; and at the funeral Eddie was still the object of more or less
disguised congratulations as an important heir.

Luella solaced him with rare tact and tenderness, and spoke much of his
loneliness and his need of a helpmate. Eddie resolved to ask her to
marry him as soon as he could compose the speech.

Some days later Uncle Loren's farewell will turned up, and Eddie fell
from grace with a thump. The town laughed at him, as people always laugh
when a person--particularly so plump a person as Eddie was--falls hard
on the slippery sidewalk of this icy world.

In his dismay he hastened to Luella for sympathy, but she turned up
missing. She jilted him with a jolt that knoc