his finger seemed to catch in a half open pamphlet, and he
bent down casually to straighten out the page. "Area in square
miles--9,565," he read aloud musingly. "Principal products--hay, oats,
maple-sugar--" Suddenly he threw down the pamphlet and flung
himself into the nearest chair and began to laugh. "Maple-sugar?" he
ejaculated. "Maple-sugar? Oh, glory! And I suppose there are some
people who think that maple-sugar is the sweetest thing that ever came
out of Vermont!"

The Doctor started to give him some fresh advice--but left him a
bromide instead.

X

Though the ensuing interview with Cornelia and her mother began quite
as coolly as the interview with the Doctor, it did not happen to end
even in hysterical laughter.

It was just two days after the Doctor's hurried exit that Stanton
received a formal, starchy little note from Cornelia's mother
notifying him of their return.

Except for an experimental, somewhat wobbly-kneed journey or two to
the edge of the Public Garden he had made no attempts as yet to resume
any outdoor life, yet for sundry personal reasons of his own he did
not feel over-anxious to postpone the necessary meeting. In the
immediate emergency at hand strong courage was infinitely more of an
asset than strong knees. Filling his suitcase at once with all the
explanatory evidence that he could carry, he proceeded on cab-wheels
to Cornelia's grimly dignified residence. The street lamps were just
beginning to be lighted when he arrived.

As the butler ushered him gravely into the beautiful drawing room he
realized with a horrid sinking of the heart that Cornelia and her
mother were already sitting there waiting for him with a dreadful
tight lipped expression on their faces which seemed to suggest that
though he was already fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment they
had been waiting for him there since early dawn.

The drawing room itself was deliciously familiar to him;
crimson-curtained, green carpeted, shining with heavy gilt picture
frames and prismatic chandeliers. Often with posies and candies and
theater-tickets he had strutted across that erstwhile magic threshold
and fairly lolled in the big deep-upholstered chairs while waiting for
the silk-rustling advent of the ladies. But now, with his suitcase
clutched in his hand, no Armenian peddler of laces and ointments could
have felt more grotesquely out of his element.

Indolently Cornelia's mother lifted her lorgnette and gaz