e wreckage. I
shall be on the job at eight. The loafers won't start at seven, as I
used to. Don't think I'd see any son of mine robbed before my very eyes.
My new overalls are laid out and my valet has instructions to get me
into them at seven, though he persists in believing I'm to attend a
fancy-dress ball at some strangely fashionable hour. So I bid you all
good evening.'

"Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of
herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the
empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a
torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at
last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid
out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every
twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.

"And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, _fills_, was
walking swiftly up and down for about one hour. He made no speech like
the night before. He just walked and walked. The part that struck me was
that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of
pleading old Angus out of his mad folly. They both seemed to know the
Scotch when it did break out.

"At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and
a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house. The
curtains to Ellabelle's Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly
bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great
agony. Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car. A few
minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he
would not be home to lunch. Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him
in a tin pail he'd bought the day before, with a little cupola on top
for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.

"It was a joyous home that day, if you don't care how you talk. All it
needed was a crepe necktie on the knob of the front door. That ornery
old hound, Angus, got in from his work at six, spotty with paint and
smelling of oil and turpentine, but cheerful as a new father. He washed
up, ridding himself of at least a third of the paint smell, looked in at
Ellabelle's door to say, 'What! Not feeling well, mamma? Now, that's too
bad!' ate a hearty dinner with me, young Angus not having been heard
from further, and fell asleep in a gold armchair at ten minutes past
nine.

"He was off again n