le merriment,
Edith's voice could be heard--"Bobby, aren't you awful!" and Sheridan
glanced across at his wife appealingly.

She rose at once and went into the "reception-room"; there was a flurry
of whispering, and the sound of tiptoeing in the hall--Edith and her
suitor changing quarters to a more distant room. Mrs. Sheridan returned
to her chair in the library.

"They won't bother you any more, papa," she said, in a comforting voice.
"She told me at lunch he'd 'phoned he wanted to come up this evening,
and I said I thought he'd better wait a few days, but she said she'd
already told him he could." She paused, then added, rather guiltily: "I
got kind of a notion maybe Roscoe don't like him as much as he used
to. Maybe--maybe you better ask Roscoe, papa." And as Sheridan nodded
solemnly, she concluded, in haste: "Don't say I said to. I might be
wrong about it, anyway."

He nodded again, and they sat for some time in a silence which Mrs.
Sheridan broke with a little sniff, having fallen into a reverie that
brought tears. "That Miss Vertrees was a good girl," she said. "SHE was
all right."

Her husband evidently had no difficulty in following her train of
thought, for he nodded once more, affirmatively.

"Did you--How did you fix it about the--the Realty Company?" she
faltered. "Did you--"

He rose heavily, helping himself to his feet by the arms of his chair.
"I fixed it," he said, in a husky voice. "I moved Cantwell up, and put
Johnston in Cantwell's place, and split up Johnston's work among the
four men with salaries high enough to take it." He went to her, put
his hand upon her shoulder, and drew a long, audible, tremulous breath.
"It's my bedtime, mamma; I'm goin' up." He dropped the hand from her
shoulder and moved slowly away, but when he reached the door he stopped
and spoke again, without turning to look at her. "The Realty Company'll
go right on just the same," he said. "It's like--it's like sand, mamma.
It puts me in mind of chuldern playin' in a sand-pile. One of 'em sticks
his finger in the sand and makes a hole, and another of 'em'll pat the
place with his hand, and all the little grains of sand run in and fill
it up and settle against one another; and then, right away it's flat on
top again, and you can't tell there ever was a hole there. The Realty
Company'll go on all right, mamma. There ain't anything anywhere, I
reckon, that wouldn't go right on--just the same."

And he passed out slowly into