E BECOMES A PARENT

The entrance into the dining-room of the curly headed young man and
his pretty little niece, who had a suite on the eighth floor, as the
room clerk informed all inquirers, was always a matter of interest to
the residents of the Hotel Winchester. They were an extremely
picturesque pair to the eye seeking for romance and color. The child
had the pure, clear cut features of the cameo type of New England
maidenhood. She was always dressed in some striking combination of
blue, deep blue like her eyes, with blue hair ribbons. Her
good-looking young relative, with hair almost as near the color of the
sun as her own, seemed to be entirely devoted to her, which,
considering the charm of the child and the radiant and magnetic spirit
of the young man himself, was a delightfully natural manifestation.

But one morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the
usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the
young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that
sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl
fumbled her menu card, but the waitress--the usual aging pedagogic
type of the small residential hotel--stood unnoticed at the young
man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from
his gloomy meditations to address her. When he turned to her at last,
however, it was with the grin that she had grown to associate with
him,--the grin, the absence of which had kept her waiting behind his
chair with a patience that she was, except in a case where her
affections were involved, entirely incapable of. Jimmie's
protestations of inability to make headway with the ladies were not
entirely sincere.

"Bring me everything on the menu," he said, with a wave of his hand in
the direction of that painstaking pasteboard. "Coffee, tea, fruit,
marmalade, breakfast food, ham and eggs. Bring my niece here the same.
That's all." With another wave of the hand he dismissed her.

"You can't eat it all, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor protested.

"I'll make a bet with you," Jimmie declared. "I'll bet you a dollar
to a doughnut that if she brings it all, I'll eat it."

"Oh! Uncle Jimmie, you know she won't bring it. You never bet so I can
get the dollar,--you never do."

"I never bet so I can get my doughnut, if it comes to that."

"I don't know where to buy any doughnuts," Eleanor said; "besides,
Uncle Jimmie, I don't really consider that I owe them.