ieve you ever have really admired Mrs. Brenton,"
she said.

"No." The doctor spoke with slow decision. "There is no especial reason
that I should. She is a totally brainless little cus--"

"Father!"

The doctor shot one expressive glance at his horrified daughter. Then,
with exceeding deliberation, he continued his interrupted word.

"--tomer, and her only place in the moral universe is to act as a leech
on Brenton's nervous system. The worst of it is, when her beneficent
work is ended, he'll find out that he is powerless to shake her off.
It's enough, the watching them, I mean, to make one believe in a
tentative marriage system, at least within the rural districts. The
bumpkin comes up to marriageable age, and takes the first--"

"Father!" Olive remonstrated once more. "Mr. Brenton isn't a bumpkin.
He never was."

"My dear," the doctor set down his empty cup; "who mentioned Brenton,
anyway? I was merely talking about Brenton's wife."

Olive went a step backward in the conversation.

"She may not literally eat with her knife," she said; "but, at least,
she does it metaphorically, and then, at the end, she licks it. Yes,
that's very vulgar; but it is true, and there's nobody but you to hear
it. Listen. I haven't told you the worst yet." And Olive recounted to
her father Kathryn Brenton's catechism concerning Opdyke, her manifest
and merciless curiosity, so thinly veiled behind her avowed desire to
administer consolation.

When she had finished, the doctor shook his wise gray head.

"Some women are merely pussy cats, Olive, and some of them are
panthers," he said gravely. "I am glad you told me. I'll put the
Opdykes on their guard. Reed has seemed to be gaining lately; more
depends on his nerves than those New York butchers of his are quite
aware. I do know it, because I've taken care of his mother ahead of
him; and there are some cases when an old-fashioned doctor with common
sense and a closet full of family traditions is worth a dozen modern
surgeons. Reed has been doing a little better lately; you and Dolph
Dennison, with all your nonsense, are steadying him wonderfully. But
that she-gargoyle! Olive, she'd have Reed in his coffin, inside of half
an hour. I'll see that she's kept out on the steps. If she wants to
kill her husband, I can't help it. She's got her grip on him. I'll be
hanged, though, if she gets that nose of hers inside Reed Opdyke's
room."

"I wonder," Olive rested her elbows on the table,