to be on the point of tears, but she came into the
room and sat across the table from him. In spite of the blurring
moisture in her eyes he could still read the old look of ownership. Time
had not impaired it.

"I just perfectly wouldn't let them know I felt bad," she began. "I said
I was going to sleep and wouldn't worry one bit if you perfectly never
came home all night. And you never did, because I couldn't sleep and
watched ... but I wouldn't let them know it for just perfectly old hundred
thousand dollars. And this morning I said I'd had a bully sleep and felt
fit and you had a right to go where you wanted to and they could please
mind their own affairs, and I laughed so at them when they said they
were going for the police--"

"Police, eh? Let 'em bring their old police. They think I'm afraid of
police?" He valiantly attacked an egg.

"Of course not, stupid, but they thought you might wander off and get
lost, like those people in the newspapers that wake up in Jersey City or
some place and can't remember their own names or how it happened, and
they wanted the police to just perfectly find you, and I wanted them to,
too. I was deathly afraid--"

"I know my own name, all right. I'm little Tempest and Sunshine; that's
my name.

"--but I wouldn't let them know I was afraid. And I laughed at them and
told them they didn't know you at all and that you'd come home--come
home."

He found he could strangely not be an upstart another moment in the
presence of that flapper. He was over kneeling beside her, reaching his
arms up about her, pressing her cheek down to his. The flapper held him
tightly and wept.

"There, there!" he soothed her, smoothing the golden brown hair that
spilled about her shoulders. "No one ever going to hurt you while I'm
around. You're the just perfectly _dearest_, if you come right down to
it. Now, now! 'S all right. Everything all right!"

"It's those perfectly old taggers," exploded the flapper, suddenly
recovering her true form, "just furiously tagging."

"'S got to stop right now," declared Bean, rising. "Wipe that egg off
your face, and let's get out of here."

"London," she suggested brightly. "Granny has always--"

"No London!" he broke in, visibly returning to the Corsican or upstart
manner. "And no Grandma, no Pops, no Moms! You and me--us--understand
what I mean? Think I'm going to have my wife sloshing around over there,
voting, smashing windows, getting run in and sent to t