,' he remarks generously.

"'Even so, I hate to see you cheated,' says his father kindly. 'I hate
to have you pay unjust extortions out of the mere pittance your
tight-fisted old father allows you.'

"Young Angus said nothing to this, but blushed and coughed
uncomfortably.

"'If you hurt that hotel anything like twenty-three hundred dollars'
worth, it must be an interesting sight,' his father goes on brightly.

"'Oh, it was funny at the time,' says Angus boy, cheering up again.

"'Things often are,' says old Angus. 'I'll have a look.'

"'At the bill?'

"'No, at the wreck,' says he. The old boy was still quiet on the
outside, but was plainly under great excitement, for he now folded his
napkin with care, a crime of which I knew Ellabelle had broken him the
first week in New York, years before. I noticed their butler had the
fine feeling to look steadily away at the wall during this obscenity.
The offender then made a pleasant remark about the beauty of the day and
left the palatial apartment swiftly. Young Angus and his mother looked
at each other and strolled after him softly over rugs costing about
eighty thousand dollars. The husband and father was being driven off by
a man he could trust in a car they had let him have for his own use.
Later Ellabelle confides to me that she mistrusts old Angus is
contemplating some bit of his national deviltry. 'He had a strange look
on his face,' says she, 'and you know--once a Scotchman, always a
Scotchman! Oh, it would be pitiful if he did anything peculiarly Scotch
just at our most critical period here!' Then she felt of her face to
see if there was any nervous lines come into it, and there was, and she
beat it for the maid to have 'em rubbed out ere they set.

"Yet at dinner that night everything seemed fine, with old Angus as
jovial as I'd ever seen him, and the meal come to a cheerful end and we
was having coffee in the Looey de Medisee saloon, I think it is, before
a word was said about this here injured hotel.

"'You were far too modest this morning, you sly dog!' says Angus,
_peer_, at last, chuckling delightedly. 'You misled me grievously. That
job of wrecking shows genius of a quality that was all too rare in my
time. I suspect it's the college that does it. I shouldn't wonder now if
going through college is as good as a liberal education. I don't believe
mere uneducated house-wreckers could have done so pretty a job in twice
the time, and there's clever little