right through the ice! Oh, Aunt Kate, let me stay here!" and
locking both slender arms about the older woman's neck, she dropped her
dark, shining head upon her breast like a storm-blown bird. "It's four
below zero in Broadway this minute," she added, looking sidewise under
her curling lashes at Wolf.

"Who said so?" Wolf demanded.

"The man I bought that paper from said so; go back and ask him. Oh, joy,
that looks good!" said Norma, eyeing the pudding that was now being
drawn, crackling, bubbling, and crisp, from the oven. "Rose and I fell
over the new lineoleum in the hall; I thought it was a dead body!" she
went on, cheerfully. "I came _down_ on my family feature with such a
noise that I thought the woman downstairs would be rattling the
dumb-waiter ropes again long before this!" She stepped to the
dumb-waiter, and put her head into the shaft. "What is it, darling?" she
called.

"Norma, behave yourself. It would serve you good and right if she heard
you," Mrs. Sheridan said, in a panic. "Go change your shoes, and come
and eat your dinner. I believe," her aunt added, pausing near her, "that
you _did_ skin your nose in the hall."

"Oh, heavens!" Norma exclaimed, bringing her face close to the dark
window, as to a mirror. "Oh, say it will be gone by Friday! Because on
Friday I'm going to have tea with Mrs. Liggett--her husband came in
to-day and asked me. Oh, the darling! He certainly is the--well, the
most--well, I don't know!----His voice, and the quiet, _quiet_ way----"

"Oh, for pity's sake go change your shoes!" Rose interrupted. "You are
the biggest idiot! I went into the store to get her," Rose explained,
"and I've had all this once, in the subway. How Mr. Liggett picks up his
glasses, on their ribbon, to read the titles of books----"

"Oh, you shut up!" Norma called, departing. And unashamed, when dinner
was finished, and the table cleared, she produced a pack of cards and
said that she was going to play _The Idle Year_.

"... and if I get it, it'll mean that the man I marry is going to look
exactly like Chris Liggett."

She did not get it, and played it again. The third time she interrupted
Wolf's slow and patient perusal of the _Scientific American_ to announce
that she was now going to play it to see if he was in love with Mary
Redding.

"Think how nice that would be, Aunt Kate, a double wedding. And if Wolf
or Rose died and left a lot of children, the other one would always be
there to take in wh