lice?"

"Yes--the date."

"Strange. I hadn't. Perhaps, though, it meant more to me than to you."
He laughed peculiarly. "I fancy I didn't tell you at the time that it was
the first call I'd ever made on a young woman in my life." He laughed
again with tolerant amusement. "I was thirty-three years old then, too."

The girl drew a thread of green from a bundle of silk in her lap
deliberately. "No; you never told me that," she corroborated.

The wrinkles gathering about Darley Roberts' eyes suddenly deepened,
infallible precursor of the unexpected.

"By the way," he digressed, "I'm growing curious to know what you do with
those things you're embroidering, those--"

"Lunch cloths?"

"That's it, lunch cloths. The present makes seven, one after the other,
you've completed. I've kept count."

"Curious, you say?" The girl laughed softly. "And still you've never
asked."

"No. I fancied there'd ultimately be an end, a variation at least; but it
seems I was mistaken. Do you expect to keep them, as a man does a case of
razors, one for each day of the week?"

Again the soft little amused laugh.

"Hardly. I sell them. There are five more in prospect--an even dozen."

"Oh. I wondered."

Another void; an equally abrupt return.

"To come back to the date," recalled the man, "I remembered it distinctly
this morning when I tore the top leaf off the desk-pad. It stood out as
though it were printed in red ink, like the date of a holiday. I--do I
show signs of becoming senile--childish, Elice?"

"Not that I've noticed. You seem normal."

"Nor irresponsible--moonstruck--nothing of that kind?"

"No."

"I'm glad to hear it. I didn't know.... Somehow this morning the sight of
that date made me do a thing I haven't done since--I don't know when. I
had a consuming desire to celebrate."

The girl's head was bent low, the better to see her work.

"Yes?" she said.

Again the man stroked his chin, with the former movement of whimsical
deliberation.

"Do you know what people down town, people I do business with, call me,
Elice?" he asked.

"No."

"Never heard of 'old man' Roberts?"

"No," again.

"Well, that's me--old man Roberts--old man--thirty-four.... By the way,
what do you call me, Elice?"

"Mr. Roberts," steadily.

"Not Darley; not once in all this last year?"

No answer.

"Not Darley--even once?"

"I think not."

The eyes of the man smiled, the eyes only.

"To return again, old man Roberts had a de