othing. And
though I bestow all my Goods to feed the poor, and though I
give my body to be burned, and have not a Sense of Humor it
profiteth me nothing.

"A sense of Humor suffereth long, and is kind. A Sense of
Humor envieth not. A Sense of Humor vaunteth not itself--is
not puffed up. Doth not behave itself Unseemly, seeketh not
its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil--Beareth
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things. A Sense of Humor never faileth. But
whether there be unpleasant prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be scolding tongues they shall cease, whether
there be unfortunate knowledge it shall vanish away. When I
was a fault-finding child I spake as a fault-finding child,
I understood as a fault-finding child,--but when I became a
woman I put away fault-finding things.

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three. _But the
greatest of these is a sense of humor!_"

With a little chuckle of amusement not altogether devoid of a very
definite consciousness of being _teased_, Stanton spread all the
articles out on the bed-spread before him and tried to piece them
together like the fragments of any other jig-saw puzzle. Was the young
lady as intellectual as the Robert Browning poems suggested, or did
she mean simply to imply that she _wished_ she were? And did the
tom-boyish sling-shot fit by any possible chance with the dainty,
feminine scrap of domestic embroidery? And was the empty purse
supposed to be especially significant of an inordinate fondness for
phonograph music--or what?

Pondering, puzzling, fretting, fussing, he dozed off to sleep at last
before he even knew that it was almost morning. And when he finally
woke again he found the Doctor laughing at him because he lay holding
a scarlet slipper in his hand.

IV

The next night, very, very late, in a furious riot of wind and snow
and sleet, a clerk from the drug-store just around the corner appeared
with a perfectly huge hot-water bottle fairly sizzling and bubbling
with warmth and relief for aching rheumatic backs.

"Well, where in thunder--?" groaned Stanton out of his cold and pain
and misery.

"Search me!" said the drug clerk. "The order and the money for it came
in the last mail this evening. 'Kindly deliver largest-sized hot-water
bottle, boiling hot, to Mr. Carl Stanton,... 11.30 to-night.'"