."

"I'm not so very hungry when I have you!" cooed Mrs. Dicky.

"But you can't eat me." He brought her hand down from his hair--I may be
stingy in my old age, but I've learned a few things, and one is that a
man feels like a fool with his hair rumpled, and I can tell the degree
of a woman's experience by the way she lets his top hair alone--and
pretended to bite it, her hand, of course. "Although I could eat you,"
he said. "I'd like to take a bite out of your throat right there."

Well, it was no place for me unless they knew I was around. I waded
around to the door and walked in, and there was a grand upsetting of the
sealskin coat and my shepherd's plaid shawl. Mr. Dick jumped to his feet
and Mrs. Dick sat bolt upright and stared at me over the backs of the
chairs.

"Minnie!" cried Mr. Dick. "As I'm a married man, it's Minnie herself;
Minnie, the guardian angel! The spirit of the place! Dorothy, don't you
remember Minnie?"

She came toward me with her hand out. She was a pretty little thing, not
so beautiful as Miss Patty, but with a nice way about her.

"I'm awfully glad to see you again," she said. "Of course I
remember--why you are hardly dressed at all! You must be frozen!"

I went over to the fire and emptied my bedroom slippers of snow. Then I
sat down and looked at them both.

"Frozen!" repeated I; "I'm in a hot sweat. If you two children meant to
come, why in creation didn't you come in time?"

"We did," replied Mr. Dick, promptly. "We crawled under the wire fence
into the deer park at five minutes to twelve. The will said 'Be on the
ground,' and I was--flat on the ground!"

"We've had the police," I said, drearily enough. "I wouldn't live
through another day like yesterday for a hundred dollars."

"We were held up by the snow," he explained. "We got a sleigh to come
over in, but we walked up the hill and came here. I don't mind saying
that my wife's people don't know about this yet, and we're going to lay
low until we've cooked up some sort of a scheme to tell them." Then he
came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Poor old Minnie!" he said; "honest, I'm sorry. I've been a hard child
to raise, haven't I? But that's all over, Minnie. I've got an incentive
now, and it's 'steady, old boy,' for me from now. You and I will run the
place and run it right."

"I don't want to!" I retorted, holding my bedroom slippers to steam
before the fire. "I'm going to buy out Timmon's candy store and live a