en over to the Benningtons'," she began, rather breathless.

"What's the news?"

"There is no truth in the report of Patty's engagement to young
Whiteland."

"There isn't? Well, there ought to be, after the way they went around
together last winter."

"She told me so herself," Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene declared emphatically.
"Do you know what I believe?"

"No," truthfully.

"I've an idea that Patty is inclined toward that fellow Warrington."

"You don't mean it!"

"He's always around there. He must have thought a great deal of his
aunt. She was buried to-day, and there he is, playing billiards with
John Bennington. If that isn't heartlessness!"

"What do you want a man to do?" growled her husband from behind his
cigar. "Sit in a dark room and wring his hands all day, like a woman?
Men have other things to do in life than mourn the departed."

"Franklyn? I didn't see you."

"You seldom do."

Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene at once plunged into a discussion of fashion,
the one thing that left her husband high and dry, so far as his native
irony was concerned.

That same night McQuade concluded some interesting business. He
possessed large interests in the local breweries. Breweries on the
average do not pay very good dividends on stock, so the brewer often
establishes a dozen saloons about town to help the business along.
McQuade owned a dozen or more of these saloons, some in the heart of
the city, some in the outlying wards of the town. He conducted the
business with his usual shrewdness. The saloons were all well managed
by Germans, who, as a drinking people, are the most orderly in the
world. It was not generally known that McQuade was interested in the
sale of liquors. His name was never mentioned in connection with the
saloons.

One of these saloons was on a side street. The back door of it faced
the towpath. It did not have a very good reputation; and though, for
two years, no disturbances had occurred there, the police still kept
an eye on the place. It was on the boundary line of the two most
turbulent wards in the city. To the north was the Italian colony, to
the south was the Irish colony. Both were orderly and self-respecting
as a rule, though squalor and poverty abounded. But these two races
are at once the simplest and most quick-tempered, and whenever an
Irishman or an Italian crossed the boundary line there was usually a
hurry call for the patrol wagon, and some one was always more or less
battered