vantages, in some cases. But----"

"Then what am I to be called?"

She might have retorted that she should call him nothing at all: he
never addressed her by any name. Instead, she answered, "Boobles."

"Boobles?"

"Boobles," she repeated firmly. And then came laughter. Ikey's rages had
a way of breaking up in inconvenient bursts of hilarity these days.

But what difference did that make now? What difference did anything
make?

"I don't see," Ikey said to herself desperately, "what makes me so
stupid. I'm afflicted with chronic mental nearsightedness. Most
distressing. This is really a tragedy I'm mixed up in--a tragedy. And
tragedy's a thing I never cared for."

She collapsed miserably on a bench and stared at the letter.

"It's queer how tragedy and going to sea give you the same feeling."

It was not pity--oh, no--that had made him want to marry her. And it was
not love. And it was not because he needed an anchor. Not he. He was not
that kind. It was simply because she was his opportunity. Yes; that was
the word. And she had never suspected.

Not that afternoon in the vacant lot, when he had inquired so
exhaustingly as to her bank account.

Not the next week, when he appeared from town in the middle of the
afternoon, all unheralded and paler than ordinary, with papers to sign,
and the exhilarating news that the insurance companies had paid up, and
a new bank-book with her name and comforting fat figures in it.

How desperately glad she had been over that. For hot shame possessed her
at her appearance--shabby clothes and hardly any of them, when his
ready-made dust-colored garments had immediately been replaced by the
well-fitting blue serge that was her special weakness in masculine
attire. She had invested heavily in frills and slowly regained her
self-respect.

And not when he had appeared with a list of her property--how had he
come by that list?--stating that he had made arrangements to lease
certain pieces and rebuild at once on the others, and asking her
approval of the final arrangements.

She had not suspected him then, either, idiot that she was. She had been
too busy being rested, being thankful, being happy in the big garden,
tucked away from the people who had failed her and the ghastly city and
the memory of its great disaster.

She turned to the letter again. Bixler McFay had always written a good
letter. This time he quite surpassed himself.

Heart-broken, unreconciled; his hopes sh