o but run into the
whole crowd at San Anselmo! I wish you could have seen their faces! We
had said we couldn't possibly go; and we were going too fast to stop
and explain!"

"We'll explain to-morrow," said the doctor, so significantly that
Ferdie rose instantly to grasp his hand, and Elsie fell again upon
Sally as if she had never kissed her before.

"Not--not really!" gasped Elsie, turning radiantly from one to the
other.

"Oh, really!" said Sally, with her prettiest color. "He despises me,
but he will take the case, anyway! And he has done nothing but mortify
and enrage me all day, but I feel that I should miss it if it stopped!
So we are going to sacrifice our lives to each other--isn't it edifying
and beautiful of us? We'll tell you all about it to-morrow. Jam--Sam?"

THE GAY DECEIVER

After the meat course, Mrs. Tolley and Min rather languidly removed the
main platters and, by reaching backward, piled the dinner plates on the
shining new oak sideboard. Thus room was made for the salad, which was
always mantled in tepid mayonnaise, whether it was sliced tomatoes, or
potatoes, or asparagus. After the salad there was another partial
clearance, and then every available inch of the table was needed for
peach pies and apple sauce and hot gingerbread and raspberries, or
various similar delicacies, and the coffee and yellow cheese and
soda-crackers with which the meal concluded.

By the time these appeared, on a hot summer evening, the wheezing clock
in the kitchen would have struck six,--dinner was early at
Kirkwood,--and the level rays of the sun would be pouring boldly in at
the uncurtained western windows. The dining, room was bare, and not
entirely free from flies, despite an abundance of new green screening
at the windows. Relays of new stiff oak chairs stood against its walls,
ready for the sudden need of occasional visitors. On the walls hung
framed enlarged photographs of machinery, and factories, and
scaffoldings, and the like. There was one of laborers and bosses
grouped about great generators and water-wheels in transit, and another
of a monster switchboard, with a smiling young operator, in his apron
and overalls, standing beside it.

Mrs. Tolley sat at the head of the table--a big, joyous, vigorous
widow, who had managed the Company House at Kirkwood ever since its
erection two years before, and who had been an employee of the Light
and Power Company, in one capacity or another, for some five