and ran downstairs.

Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to
stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling
together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the
morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and
when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook,
moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something
about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but,
hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his
first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him
impatient of the delay.

He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before
him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet
ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you
need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your
queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when
I'm not here to keep track of you."

He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.

"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia assured him, with her quick
acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or
something, and I got yours first."

Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more
regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying
the--"

"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily
terror of her life.

"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on
facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one
if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue
from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a
dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows
where I may have dropped it."

The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the
sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her
brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was
wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would
unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if
he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would
have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in
spite of such practical and experienced counsel,