all right, but
I didn't have little Clifford's. Where do you hide it?"

"In the bank and here at home," returned Gilman with a snarl; "and
I've been at it so long I'm beginning to curdle. You've worked in
every mercantile establishment, factory and professional office in
town, and never cared to hold a job. Yet everybody likes you. You
drink, smoke, gamble and raise the dickens generally. You don't save a
cent and yet you always manage to have money. You dress swell and
don't amount to a tinker's cuss, yet you're happy all day long. Come
along to the Putnam County Fair and show me how."

"The Putnam County Fair!" repeated Wix. "Two hundred miles to get a
drink?"

"I can't take one any closer, can I?" demanded Gilman savagely. "But
the real reason is that Uncle Thomas lives there. I can go to visit
Uncle Thomas when I wouldn't be allowed to 'go on the cars alone'
anywhere else. But uncle is a good fellow and his wife don't write to
my mother. He tells me to go ahead; and I don't need go near him
unless I'm in trouble."

"Some time I'll borrow your Uncle Tom," laughed Wix. "He sounds good
to me."

Mrs. Gilman came to the door. She was a thin, nervous, little woman,
with a long chin and a narrow forehead.

"Come in, Cliffy," she urged in a shrill, wheedling voice. "You must
have a good, long night's rest for your trip in the morning." In
reality she was worried to have her Clifford talking with the
graceless Wix--though secretly she admired Jonathan Reuben.

"I must go in now," said Gilman hastily. "Go down to the train in the
morning and get in on the other side, so mother won't see you. And
don't tell your mother where you've gone."

"She won't ask," responded Wix, laughing. "Nothing ever worries mother
except our name. I don't like it myself, but I don't worry over it. It
isn't my fault, and it was hers."

If Wix felt any trace of bitterness over his mother's indifference he
never confessed it, even to himself. Mrs. Wix, left a sufficient
income by the late unloved, lived entirely by routine, with a
separate, complacent function for every afternoon of the week. She was
very comfortable, and plump, and placid, was Mrs. Wix, and Jonathan
Reuben was merely an excrescence upon her scheme of life. Jonathan
Reuben, however, had no lack of feminine sympathy. Quite a little
clique of dashing young matrons, with old or dryly preoccupied
husbands, vied with the girls to make him happy.

In the present instance, you