with a curling cloud of
her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation
must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these
combings in the little blue vase on the mantel to be some day formed
into the coveted feminine "rat."

Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper.
John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus:

Dear John: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick.
I am going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet
me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I
hope it isn't her quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She
had it bad last spring. Don't forget to write to the company
about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer.
I will write to-morrow.

Hastily, KATY.

Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been
separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a
dumbfounded way. Here was a break in a routine that had never
varied, and it left him dazed.

There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless,
the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting
the meals. Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in
her haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butter-scotch lay with
its string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping
rectangularly where a railroad time-table had been clipped from it.
Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its
soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains
with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart.

He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched
her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He
had never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had
become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the
air he breathed--necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without
warning, she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had
never existed. Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most
a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had
pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home.

John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat
down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade's
shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings
now appeared to h