nshine. The beautiful
maples with their dense shadows threw the sidewalks into coolness.
Up one street and down another the horses took their accustomed way.
Finally they pulled up opposite the Orde house. Orde hitched the horses,
and, his step quickening in anticipation, sprang up the walk and into
the front door.

"Hullo, sweetheart!" he called cheerily.

The echoes alone answered him. He cried again, and yet again, with a
growing feeling of disappointment that Carroll should happen to be from
home. Finally a door opened and shut in the back part of the house. A
moment later Mary, the Irish servant girl, came through the dining-room,
caught sight of Orde, threw her apron over her head, and burst into
one of those extravagant demonstrations of grief peculiar to the
warm-hearted of her class.

Orde stopped short, a sinking at his heart.

"What is it, Mary?" he asked very quietly.

But the girl only wept the louder, rocking back and forth in a fresh
paroxysm of grief. Beside himself with anxiety Orde sprang forward
to shake her by the arm, to shower her with questions. These elicited
nothing but broken and incoherent fragments concerning "the missus,"
"oh, the sad day!" "and me lift all alone with Bobby, me heart
that heavy," and the like, which served merely to increase Orde's
bewilderment and anxiety. At this moment Bobby himself appeared from the
direction of the kitchen. Orde, frantic with alarm, fell upon his son.
Bobby, much bewildered by all this pother, could only mumble something
about "smallpox," and "took mamma away with doctor."

"Where? where, Bobby?" cried Orde, fairly shaking the small boy by the
shoulder. He felt like a man in a bad dream, trying to reach a goal that
constantly eluded him.

At this moment a calm, dry voice broke through the turmoil of questions
and exclamations. Orde looked up to see the tall, angular form of Doctor
McMullen standing in the doorway.

"It's all right," said the doctor in answer to Orde's agonised
expression. "Your wife was exposed to smallpox and is at my house to
avoid the danger of spreading contagion. She is not ill."

Having thus in one swift decisive sentence covered the ground of Orde's
anxiety, he turned to the sniffling servant.

"Mary," said he sternly, "I'm ashamed of you! What kind of an exhibition
is this? Go out to the kitchen and cook us some lunch!" He watched her
depart with a humourous quirk to his thin lips. "Fool Irish!" he said
with a Scotc