sprightliest manner, "that that girl who killed her
lover was refused credit at every store in Prouty. No one would trust
her for even five dollars' worth of groceries. Rather pathetic, isn't
it?"

Mr. Pantin looked up quickly.

"Who told you that?"

"Everyone seems to know it."

Mr. Pantin frowned slightly.

"If you mean Miss Prentice, I wouldn't speak of her in that fashion,
Priscilla."

"Mormon Joe's Kate, then, if you like that better," replied Mrs. Pantin,
nettled.

"Or 'Mormon Joe's Kate,' either," curtly.

"So sorry; I didn't know you knew her. Do you?"

Mr. Pantin, who at his own table was given the privilege of taking bones
in his fingers, pointed the chop at her.

"Let me tell you something, Priscilla," impressively. "Someone who is
cleverer than I am has said that it is never safe to snub a pretty girl,
because there is always the possibility that she'll marry well and be
able to retaliate. The same thing applies to one who has brains and is
in earnest. I've made it a rule never to disparage the efforts of a
person who had a definite purpose and works to attain it. It's about a
fifty-to-one shot that he'll land--sometime."

Mrs. Pantin looked at her husband suspiciously. There were times when
she had a notion that she had not explored the furthermost recesses of
his nature--when she wondered if it had not ramifications and passages
unknown to her. It had. It was Mr. Pantin's dearest wish to come home
boiling drunk with his hat smashed and his necktie hanging. He longed to
kick the front door in and see his wife cower before him. The mental
orgies in which he indulged while sitting placidly in the bow window
automatically snapping his Romeo against the heel of his foot by a
muscular contraction of the toes--would have curdled the blood of
Priscilla Pantin.

It was an interesting case of atavism. There was little doubt but that
Mr. Pantin was a throwback to a sportive ancestor who had kept a pacer
that could do a little better than 2.13 when conditions were favorable,
but had rendered the family homeless by betting one hundred and sixty
acres of black walnut timber against a horse that left him so far behind
that the spectators urged him to throw something overboard to see if he
was moving. All this was family history. Mr. Pantin fought against his
predilection to gamble on anything or anybody as he would have fought an
impulse to take human life.

It did not escape Mrs. Pantin's attention no