rose.

Sometimes she reflected uneasily that Mamma's affairs were only
temporarily settled, after all, and sometimes George made her heart
sink with uncompromising statements regarding the future, but for the
most part Mary's natural sunniness kept her cheerful and unapprehensive.

Almost unexpectedly, therefore, the crash came. It came on a very hot
day, which, following a week of delightfully cool weather, was like a
last flaming hand-clasp from the departing summer. It was a Monday, and
had started wrong with a burned omelette at breakfast, and unripe
melons. And the one suit George had particularly asked to have cleaned
and pressed had somehow escaped Mary's vigilance, and still hung
creased and limp in the closet. So George went off, feeling a little
abused, and Mary, feeling cross, too, went slowly about her morning
tasks. Another annoyance was when the telephones had been cut off; a
man with a small black bag mysteriously appearing to disconnect them,
and as mysteriously vanishing when once their separated parts lay
useless on the floor. Mary, idly reading, and comfortably stretched on
a couch in her own room at eleven o'clock, was disturbed by the frantic
and incessant ringing of the front doorbell.

"Lizzie went in to Broadway, I suppose," she reflected uneasily. "But I
oughtn't to go down this way! Let him try again."

"He"--whoever he was--did try again so forcibly and so many times that
Mary, after going to the head of the kitchen stairs to call Lizzie,
with no result, finally ran down the main stairway herself, and
gathering the loose frills of her morning wrapper about her, warily
unbolted the door.

She admitted George, whose face was dark with heat, and whose voice
rasped.

"Where's Lizzie?" he asked, eying Mary's negligee.

"Oh, dearie--and I've been keeping you waiting!" Mary lamented. "Come
into the dining-room, it's cooler. She's marketing."

George dropped into a chair and mopped his forehead.

"No one to answer the telephone?" he pursued, frowning.

"It's disconnected, dear. Georgie, what is it?--you look sick."

"Well, I am, just about!" George said sternly. Then, irrelevantly, he
demanded: "Mary, did you know your mother had disposed of her Sunbright
shares?"

"Sold her copper stock!" Mary ejaculated, aghast For Mamma's entire
income was drawn from this eminently safe and sane investment, and Mary
and George had never ceased to congratulate themselves upon her good
fortune in getti