be the usual
holiday-cold-turkey supper, daddy."

"Yes, Phil; I'll be back after while. I'm going for a tramp."

But she knew that he had gone to see Nan.

CHAPTER XVIII

AMZI IS FLABBERGASTED

Struby's drug-store did a large business in hot drinks in the week
following Christmas, as citizens and citizenesses met to discuss the
return of Lois Montgomery. The annual choir-row in Center Church caused
scarcely a ripple; the county poorhouse burned to the ground, and nobody
cared particularly; an august professor in the college was laid low with
whooping-cough, and even this calamity failed to tickle the community as
it would have done in ordinary circumstances.

Wonder and mystery were in the air of Main Street. Persons who had no
money in Montgomery's Bank, and whom the liveliest imagination could not
dramatize as borrowers from that institution, dropped in casually on
fictitious errands, in the hope of seeing or hearing something.
Housewives who lived beyond the college, or over in the new bungalow
addition across the Monon tracks, who had no business whatever in the
neighborhood of the old Montgomery place, made flimsy excuses for
visiting that region in the hope of catching a glimpse of a certain lady
who, after a long absence, had reappeared in town with bewildering
suddenness. What Amzi had said to his sisters Kate, Josie, and Fanny and
what they had said to him, and what Mrs. Lois Montgomery Holton had said
to them all afforded an ample field for comment where facts were known;
and where there were no facts, speculation and invention rioted
outrageously. Had Tom Kirkwood seen his former wife? Would Phil break
with her father and go to live at Amzi's with her mother? Was it true
that Lois had come back to Indiana in the hope of effecting a
reconciliation with Jack Holton, of whom unpleasant reports were now
reaching Montgomery from the state capital? An intelligent community
possessed of a healthy curiosity must be pardoned for polishing its
spectacles when a drama so exciting and presenting so many characters is
being disclosed upon its stage.

It was said that Mrs. Holton emerged from Amzi's house daily to take the
air. She had been observed by credible witnesses at the stamp window of
the post-office; again, she had bought violets at the florist's; she had
been seen walking across the Madison campus. The attendants in the new
Carnegie library had been thrilled by a visit from a strange lady who
co