u suppose he was ill and huntin' for a drug store?"

Arethusa had been sent for the second day previous because Lucinda's
youngest sister's youngest child had come down with scarlet fever, and the
family wanted Lucinda to enliven the quarantine. Arethusa had sent
invitations out for a dinner party, but she had recalled them and hastened
to obey the summons. It was an evil hour for her, for she loved her
brother and was mightily distressed at the bad news.

"I don't believe he can have been ill," she said, at the top of her voice;
"if he'd been ill he wouldn't have had the strength to hit the cab driver
so hard."

"I don't blame him for hittin' the cab driver," said Aunt Mary warmly. "As
near as I can recollect, I've often wanted to do that myself. But I can't
make out where he got the man to hit, or why he was there to hit him. I
can't make rhyme or reason out of it. I wish we knew more. Well, I presume
we will, later."

Her surmise was correct. They knew much more later. They knew more from
Mr. Stebbins, and they knew profusely more from the evening papers.

"I think our boy'd better have come home for his Easter," Aunt Mary
remarked, with a species of angry undertow threading the current of her
speech. "There's no sayin' what this will cost before we're done with it."

Arethusa choked; it was all so very terrible to her.

"What is it that the cabman wants, anyhow?" her aunt demanded presently.

"He doesn't want anything," yelled the unhappy sister. "He's going to
die."

"Well, who is going to sue me, then?"

"It's his wife; she wants five thousand dollars damages."

Aunt Mary's lips tightened.

"Five thousand dollars!" she said, with a bitter patience. "I can see that
this is goin' to be an awful business. Five thousand dollars! Dear, dear!
I must say that that wife sets a pretty high price on her husband--at
least, a'cordin' to my order of thinkin', she does. From what I've seen of
cabmen, I'd undertake to get her another just as good for a tenth of the
money, any day."

Arethusa was silent, staring thoughtfully at the newspaper cuts of a great
Tammany leader and a noted pugilist, which had been labeled as the
principals in the family tragedy.

Aunt Mary turned over another of the many papers received, and scanned its
sensational columns afresh.

"Arethusa," she exclaimed suddenly, "do you know, I bet anythin' I know
what this editor means to insinuate? It just strikes me that he's tryin'
to give th