it to himself and his family to live in the estate of
"high folks." He bought a house in what was for him an
ultra-fashionable quarter, and called for bids to furnish it in the
latest style. The results were even more regardless of taste than of
expense--carpets that fought with curtains, pictures that quarreled
with their frames and with the walls, upholstery so bellicose that it
seemed perilous to sit upon.

But Feuerstein was as impressed as the Gansers had been the first time
they beheld the gorgeousness of their palace. He looked about with a
proprietary sense--"I'll marry this little idiot," he said to himself.
"Maybe my nest won't be downy, and maybe I won't lie at my ease in it!"

He met Mrs. Ganser and had the opportunity to see just what Lena would
look and be twenty years thence. Mrs. Ganser moved with great
reluctance and difficulty. She did not speak unless forced and then
her voice seemed to have felt its way up feebly through a long and
painfully narrow passage, emerging thin, low and fainting. When she
sat--or, rather, AS she sat, for she was always sitting--her mountain
of soft flesh seemed to be slowly collapsing upon and around the chair
like a lump of dough on a mold. Her only interest in life was
disclosed when she was settled and settling at the luncheon table. She
used her knife more than her fork and her fingers more than either.
Feuerstein left soon after luncheon, lingering only long enough to give
Lena a theatrical embrace. "Well, I'll not spend much time with those
women, once I'm married," he reflected as he went down the steps; and
he thought of Hilda and sighed.

The next day but one he met Lena in the edge of the park and, after
gloomy silence, shot with strange piercing looks that made her feel as
if she were the heroine of a book, he burst forth with a demand for
immediate marriage.

"Forty-eight hours of torment!" he cried. "I shall not leave you again
until you are securely mine."

He proceeded to drop vague, adroit hints of the perils that beset a
fascinating actor's life, of the women that had come and gone in his
life. And Lena, all a-tremble with jealous anxiety, was in the parlor
of a Lutheran parsonage, with the minister reading out of the black
book, before she was quite aware that she and her cyclonic adorer were
not still promenading near the green-house in the park. "Now," said
Feuerstein briskly, as they were once more in the open air, "we'll go
to your