to go to the wash-room,
glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth in
his absence--He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and
thrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing his
tormentor again.

Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the
Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless,
thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. He
found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening.
Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the
slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd
things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When he
got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from
prying clerks.

* * * * *

McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to the
office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners
do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed--"morbid,"
they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut
down because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, when
the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies
out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his
desk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his
pine-trees suggested death--life and youth. When he drops over some day,
his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.

As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and
impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when
she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.

Scandal

Kitty Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cords
which defied the throat specialist. Week after week her name was posted
at the Opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of one
of her rivals was substituted. For nearly two months she had been
deprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and had
been shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her and
the world, and the wintry stretch of the Park they looked out upon. She
was losing a great deal of money, and, what was worse, she was losing
life; days of which she wanted to make the utmost were slipping by, and
nights w