s too late to retreat, both laughed and advanced.

"Who wins now?" bantered Ralph as they made the exchange.

"It looks to me like a misdeal," she gaily replied, and was moving
away when he called her back.

"You don't happen to know the Gately's, of New York, do you?" he was
quite anxious to know.

"I am truly sorry, but I am acquainted with so few people in New York.
We are from Chicago, you know."

"Oh," said he blankly, and took the water up to the Ellsworth suite.

Mrs. Ellsworth cheered up considerably when she heard that Ralph had
been met halfway, but her eyes snapped when he confessed that it was
Miss Van Kamp who had met him.

"I hope you are not going to carry on a flirtation with that
overdressed creature," she blazed.

"Why mother," exclaimed Ralph, shocked beyond measure. "What right
have you to accuse either this young lady or myself of flirting?
Flirting!"

Mrs. Ellsworth suddenly attacked the fire with quite unnecessary
energy.

X

Down at the barn, the wide threshing floor had been covered with gay
rag-rugs, and strewn with tables, couches, and chairs in picturesque
profusion. Roomy box-stalls had been carpeted deep with clean straw,
curtained off with gaudy bed-quilts, and converted into cozy sleeping
apartments. The mow and the stalls had been screened off with lace
curtains and blazing counterpanes, and the whole effect was one of
Oriental luxury and splendor. Alas, it was only an "effect"! The
red-hot parlor stove smoked abominably, the pipe carried other smoke
out through the hawmow window, only to let it blow back again. Chill
cross-draughts whistled in from cracks too numerous to be stopped up,
and the miserable Van Kamps could only cough and shiver, and envy the
Tutts and the driver, non-combatants who had been fed two hours
before.

Up in the second floor suite there was a roaring fire in the big
fireplace, but there was a chill in the room that no mere fire could
drive away--the chill of absolute emptiness.

A man can outlive hardships that would kill a woman, but a woman can
endure discomforts that would drive a man crazy.

Mr. Ellsworth went out to hunt up Uncle Billy, with an especial solace
in mind. The landlord was not in the house, but the yellow gleam of a
lantern revealed his presence in the woodshed, and Mr. Ellsworth
stepped in upon him just as he was pouring something yellow and clear
into a tumbler from a big jug that he had just taken from under the
fl