boiled eggs and milk--because steaks would kill you
sure."

"But Babette would be back at one o'clock and if I didn't get home
before then she would take my head off for me."

Mrs. Schrimm nodded sympathetically.

"So you wouldn't stay for lunch?" she said.

"I couldn't," Sam protested.

"Very well, then," Mrs. Schrimm cried as she hurried to the kitchen.
"Sit right down again, Sam; I would be right back."

When Mrs. Schrimm appeared a few minutes later she bore a cloth-covered
tray which she placed on the table in front of Sam.

"You got until half-past twelve--ain't it?" she said; "so take your
time, Sam. You should chew your food good, especially something which
it is already half chopped, like _gefuellte Rinderbrust_."

"_Gefuellte Rinderbrust!_" Sam cried. "Why"--he poked at it with his
knife--"Why, this always makes me sick." He balanced a good mouthful on
his fork. "But, anyhow----" he concluded, and the rest of the sentence
was an incoherent mumbling as he fell to ravenously. Moreover, he
finished the succulent dish, gravy and all, and washed down the whole
with a cup of coffee--not Hammersmith's coffee or the dark brown fluid,
with a flavour of stale tobacco pipe, that Miss Babette Gembitz had
come to persuade herself was coffee, but a fragrant decoction, softened
by rich, sweet cream and containing all the delicious fragrance of the
best thirty-five-cent coffee, fresh-ground from the grocer's.

"_Ja_, Henrietta," Sam cried as he rose to leave; "I am going to
weddings and fashionable hotels, and I am eating with high-grade
customers in restaurants which you would naturally take a high-grade
customer to, understand me; but--would you believe me, Henrietta!--I am
yet got to taste such coffee _oder_ such _gefuellte Rinderbrust_ as you
are giving me now."

Mrs. Schrimm beamed her acknowledgment of the compliment.

"To-morrow you would get some chicken fricassee, Sam," she said, "if
you would get here at half-past eleven sharp."

Sam shook her hand fervently.

"Believe me, I would try my best," he said; and fifteen minutes later,
when Babette entered the Gembitz residence on One Hundred and
Eighteenth Street, she found Sam as she had left him--fairly buried in
the financial page of the morning paper.

"Well, Babette," Sam cried, "so you see I went out and I took my walk
and I come back and nothing happened to me. Ain't it?"

Babette nodded.

"I'll get you your lunch right away," she said; and wi