grateful as his temperament permitted. His assault--with an umbrella
stand--had been upon a fellow reveller of no proved worth to the
community, and perhaps this may have influenced the jury's unexpected
verdict.

Of Susan herself my first impression was gained at the Eureka Garage.
Bob Blake, just then, was lying beneath my car, near which I hovered
listening to his voluble but stereotyped profanity. He had lost the nut
from a bolt, and, unduly constricted, sought it vainly, while his tongue
followed the line of least resistance. I was marveling at the energy of
his wrath and the poverty of his imagination, when I became aware of a
small being beside me, in plaid calico. She had eager black
eyes--terrier's eyes--in a white, whimsical little face. One very long
and very thin black pigtail dangled over her left shoulder and down
across her flat chest to her waist, where it was tied with a shoe string
and ended lankly, without even the semblance of a curl. In her right
hand she bore a full dinner pail, and with her left thumb she pointed
toward the surging darkness beneath my car.

"Say, mister, please," said the small being, "if I was to put this down,
would you mind telling him his dinner's come?"

"Not a bit," I responded. "Are you Bob's youngster?"

"I'm Susan Blake," she answered; and very softly placed the dinner pail
on the step of the car.

"Why don't you wait and see your father?" I suggested. "He'll come up
for air in a minute."

"That's why I'm going now," said Susan.

Whereupon she gave a single half skip--the very ghost of a skip--then
walked demurely from me and out through the great door.

II

Bob Blake, in those days, lived in a somewhat dilapidated four-room
house, off toward the wrong end of Birch Street. His family arrangements
were peculiar. He had never married again; but not very long after his
wife's death a dull-eyed, rather mussy young woman, with a fondness for
rouge pots, had taken up her abode with him--to the scandal and
fascination of the neighborhood. It was an outrage, of course! With a
child in the house, too! Something ought to be done about it!

Yet, oddly enough, nothing that much worried Bob ever was done about
it, reckoning the various shocked-and-grieved forms of conversation as
nothing. As he never tired of asserting, Bob didn't give a damn for the
cackle of a lot of hens. He guessed he knew his way about; and so did
Pearl. Let the damned hens cackle their heads off;