ame Gory's death just one year following that of her husband,
Winnebago saw less and less of the three remaining members of the royal
family. The frame house on the river bluff would be closed for a year
or more at a time. Giddy's father rather liked Winnebago and would have
been content to spend six months of the year in the old Gory house, but
Giddy's mother, who had been a Leyden, of New York, put that idea out of
his head pretty effectively.

"Don't talk to me," she said, "about your duty toward the town that gave
you your money and all that kind of feudal rot because you know you
don't mean it. It bores you worse than it does me, really, but you like
to think that the villagers are pulling a forelock when you walk down
Normal Avenue. As a matter of fact they're not doing anything of the
kind. They've got their thumbs to their noses, more likely."

Her husband protested rather weakly. "I don't care. I like the old
shack. I know the heating apparatus is bum and that we get the smoke
from the paper mills, but--I don't know--last year, when we had that
punk pink palace at Cannes I kept thinking----"

Mrs. Gideon Gory raised the Leyden eyebrow. "Don't get sentimental, Gid,
for God's sake! It's a shanty, and you know it. And you know that it
needs everything from plumbing to linen. I don't see any sense in
sinking thousands in making it livable when we don't want to live in
it."

"But I do want to live in it--once in a while. I'm used to it. I was
brought up in it. So was the kid. He likes it, too. Don't you, Giddy?"
The boy was present, as usual, at this particular scene.

The boy worshipped his mother. But, also, he was honest. So, "Yeh, I
like the ol' barn all right," he confessed.

Encouraged, his father went on: "Yesterday the kid was standing out
there on the bluff-edge breathing like a whale, weren't you, Giddy? And
when I asked him what he was puffing about he said he liked the smell of
the sulphur and chemicals and stuff from the paper mills, didn't you,
kid?"

Shame-facedly, "Yeh," said Giddy.

Betrayed thus by husband and adored son, the Leyden did battle. "You can
both stay here, then," she retorted with more spleen than elegance, "and
sniff sulphur until you're black in the face. I'm going to London in
May."

They, too, went to London in May, of course, as she had known they
would. She had not known, though, that in leading her husband to England
in May she was leading him to his death as well.