in his arms.

"My darling," said Piet, an hour later, "if I release your right hand
for ten minutes, do you think you could write a line to Mr. Anthony
Gayley? I would like to mail it when I go home to dress."

"I was thinking I might wire--" said Sammy, dreamily.

DR. BATES AND MISS SALLY

Sometimes Ferdie's jokes were successful; sometimes they were not. This
was one of the jokes that didn't succeed; but as it led to a chain of
circumstances that proved eminently satisfactory, Ferdie's wife praised
him as highly for his share in it as if he really had done something
rather meritorious.

At the time it occurred, however, nobody praised anybody, and feeling
even ran pretty high for a time between Ferdie and Elsie, his wife, and
her sister Sally, and Dr. Bates.

Dr. Samuel Bates was a rising young surgeon, plain, quiet, and kindly.
He was spending a few busy months in California, and writing dutifully
home to friends and patients in Boston that he really could not free
his hands to return just yet. But Sally knew what that meant; she had
known business to keep people in her neighborhood before. So she was
studiously unkind to the doctor, excusing herself to Elsie on the
ground that nothing on earth would ever make her consider a man with
fuzzy red hair and low collars.

Sally was a "daughter" and a "dame"; the doctor was the son of "Bates's
Blue-Ribbon Hair Renewer"--awful facts against which the additional
fact that he was rich and she was not, counted nothing. Sally talked
all the time; the doctor was the most silent of men. Sally was
twenty-two, the doctor thirty-five. Sally loved to flirt; the doctor
never paid any attention to women. Altogether, it was the most
impossible thing ever heard of, and Elsie might just as well stop
thinking about it!

"It's a wonderful proof of what he feels," said Elsie, "to have him so
gentle when you are rude to him, and so eager to be friends when you
get over it!"

"It's a wonderful example of hair-tonic spirit!" Sally responded.

"There's a good deal behind that quiet manner," argued Elsie.

"But NOT the three generations that make a gentleman!" finished Sally.

Sally was out calling one hot Saturday afternoon when Ferdie, as was
his habit, brought Dr. Bates home with him to the Ferdies' little
awninged and shingled summer home in Sausalito. Elsie, with an armful
of delightfully pink and white baby, led them to the cool side porch,
and ordered cool things to