ade anxious by an ever-ready sympathy. "Can I do
anything? I am really very sorry to have spoken so."

A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He _did_ feel a
trifle queer. A curious lightness--a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy
seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the
sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was
beating playfully, skittishly. No--it was not even beating; it was
skipping.

"Y-Yates," he stammered, "you don't think that I could p-possibly have
become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine--do you?"

Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to
him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to
instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future
father-in-law might now be in.

"Yates," repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, "tell me honestly: _do_
you think there is anything unusual the matter with me? I--I seem to
f-feel unusually--young. Do I look it? Have I changed? W-watch me while
I walk across the room."

Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and
fairly pranced across the room. "Great Heavens!" he faltered; "my hat's
on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty! Do you notice it, Yates?"

"I'm afraid I do, Mr. Carr."

"This--this is infamous!" gasped Mr. Carr. "This is--is outrageous! I'm
forty-five! I'm a widower! I detest a jaunty widower! I don't want to be
one; I don't want to----"

Yates gazed at him with deep concern.

"Can't you help lifting your legs that way when you walk--as though a
band were playing? Wait, I'll straighten your hat. Now try it again."

Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.

"I _know_ I'm doing it again," he groaned, "but I can't help it! I--I
feel so gay--dammit!--so frivolous--it's--it's that infernal machine.
W-what am I to do, Yates," he added piteously, "when the world looks
so good to me?"

"Think of your family!" urged Yates. "Think of--of Drusilla."

"Do you know," observed Carr, twirling his eyeglass and twisting his
mustache, "that I'm beginning not to care what my family think!... Isn't
it amazing, Yates? I--I seem to be somebody else, several years younger.
Somewhere," he added, with a flourish of his monocle--"somewhere on earth
there is a little birdie waiting for me."

"Don't talk that way!" exclaimed Yates, horrified.

"Yes, I will, young man. I repeat, with optimism and emph