.) "You never denied it, even when she said your name was a nomdy
gair; and you let her marry you, all right."

"Are you sure of that?" Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.

"Unh-hunh--that's what you done, all right." Sandy's voice was
dishearteningly positive.

"Lordy me!" gasped Ford under his breath.

There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He
turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was interrupted
by more questions.

"Say! Where's she at now?" Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering of
his voice.

"I d' know." Sandy read a line with greedy interest. "She took the
'leven-twenty," he added then. Another mental lapse. "You seen her to
the train yourself."

"The hell I did!" Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was
again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count in
the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly unconscious of
the look and the mental distress which caused it. Ford went back to
studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He might be able to
extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his
novel away from him--by force, probably; and the loss of the book would
be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he would refuse to answer,
or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's muscles were very, very
sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy, just then. He
repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany and had to do
with the ultimate disposal of his own soul.

"Hunh?" asked Sandy.

Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical discomfort
as well, specifically disposed of Sandy's immortal soul also.

Sandy merely grinned at him. "You don't want to take it to heart like
that," he remonstrated cheerfully.

Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of
Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents
when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs
of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic
adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the
second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.
Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave
his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his
great-grandfather from utter condemnation.

"What's eating you, Ford?" he began pacifically--for Sa