't have a merry
Christmas after all."

"I shan't be home for dinner," Steve added more politely. "Miss
Faithful's absence just now makes things quite rushed--I'll work until
late."

Beatrice sprang up, letting Monster scramble unheeded to the floor.
"Oh, you are trying to punish me!"--pretending mock horror. "Stevuns
dear, don't mind my not going! Plans are plans, you must learn to
understand. And I'll send her a lovely black waist and a plum pudding
for her Christmas. Tell her I was laid up with one of my bad heads....
No? You won't let me fib? Horrid old thing--come and kiss me!... Ah,
you never refuse to kiss me, nice cave man with bad manners and muddy
shoes, wanting to thump his strong dear fists on my little Chippendale
tables--and grow so good and booky all in an instant. Forgets he was
ever a bad pirate and robbed everyone until he could buy his Gorgeous
Girl. Good-bye, story-book man, don't let the old funeral frazzle
you!"

Steve left the house, undecided whether he was taking things too
seriously and ought to apologize for being rude to Beatrice or whether
his intuitive impression was correct--that Beatrice was not the sort
of person he had imagined but that he, per se, was to blame in the
matter.

Steve chose to take a street car to the Faithful house. He shrank from
creating the atmosphere of a generous and overbearing magnate whose
chauffeur opened the door of his machine and waited for him to step
majestically upon terra firma. He felt merely a sympathetic friend,
for some reason, as he walked the three blocks from the street car
through slush and ice, and realized that Mary Faithful trudged back
and forth this same pathway twice a day.

Unexpectedly he met Mary at the door, rather white faced and grayer of
eyes than usual, but the same sensible Mary who did not believe in any
of the customary agonies of grieving proper, as she afterward told
him. The old house had not assumed a funereal air. There were flowers
on the tables and the cheery fire crackled in the grate, and even the
face of the dead woman seemed more content and optimistic than it had
ever been in life.

Steve was not expected to go to the cemetery so he trudged back
through the same slush to the street car. A fish-market doorway proved
a haven during a long wait. He lounged idly against the doorway as if
he were an unemployed person casting about for new fields of endeavour
instead of the rushed young Midas whose office phone was r