pin?"

He was rather surprised and impressed that she had recognized
the piece for what it was. But of course she did, as a fact, know
something about music, he remembered, though she never touched the
Pianisto.

"I think it's a pity you can't choose some other evening for your
funeral marches!" she exclaimed.

"If that's it," said Edward Henry like lightning, "why did you stick
me out you weren't afraid of hydrophobia?"

"I'll thank you to come upstairs," she replied with warmth.

"Oh, all right, my dear! All right!" he cooed.

And they went upstairs in a rather solemn procession.

IV

Nellie led the way to the chamber known as "Maisie's room," where the
youngest of the Machins was wont to sleep in charge of the nurse who,
under the supervision of the mother of all three, had dominion over
Robert, Ralph and their little sister.

The first thing that Edward Henry noticed was the screen which shut
off one of the beds. The unfurling of the four-fold screen was always
a sure sign that Nellie was taking an infantile illness seriously. It
was an indication to Edward Henry of the importance of the dog-bite in
Nellie's esteem.

When all the chicks of the brood happened to be simultaneously sound
the screen reposed, inconspicuous, at an angle against a wall behind
the door; but when pestilence was abroad, the screen travelled from
one room to another in the wake of it, and, spreading wide, took part
in the battle of life and death.

In an angle of the screen, on the side of it away from the bed and
near the fire (in times of stress Nellie would not rely on radiators)
sat old Mrs.. Machin, knitting. She was a thin, bony woman of
sixty-nine years, and as hard and imperishable as teak. So far as her
son knew she had only had two illnesses in her life. The first was an
attack of influenza, and the second was an attack of acute rheumatism,
which had incapacitated her for several weeks.

Edward Henry and Nellie had taken advantage of her helplessness, then,
to force her to give up her barbaric cottage in Brougham Street and
share permanently the splendid comfort of their home. She existed
in their home like a philosophic prisoner-of-war at the court of
conquerors, behaving faultlessly, behaving magnanimously in the
melancholy grandeur of her fall, but never renouncing her soul's
secret independence, nor permitting herself to forget that she was on
foreign ground.

When Edward Henry looked at those yellow and s