to the drum.
"Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece." And prepared to
leave.

"'My Georgia Crackerjack'," said the laconic drum.

Orville Platt took a hasty side-step in the direction of the door toward
which Terry was headed. "It's a pretty thing," he said, fervently. "An
awful pretty thing. Thanks. It's beautiful."

Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder: "Don't thank _me_
for it. I didn't write it."

Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel. He wandered up
Cass street, and into the ten-o'clock quiet of Main street, and down as
far as the park and back. "Pretty as a pink! And play!... And good, too.
Good."

A fat man in love.

At the end of six months they were married. Terry was surprised into it.
Not that she was not fond of him. She was; and grateful to him, as well.
For, pretty as she was, no man had ever before asked Terry to be his
wife. They had made love to her. They had paid court to her. They had
sent her large boxes of stale drug-store chocolates, and called her
endearing names as they made cautious declaration such as:

"I've known a lot of girls, but you've got something different. I don't
know. You've got so much sense. A fellow can chum around with you.
Little pal."

Orville's headquarters were Wetona. They rented a comfortable,
seven-room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighbourhood, and Terry
dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats and paradise
aigrettes. Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to her
ear, accustomed to the metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it
sounded out of tune. She played a great deal at first, but unconsciously
she missed the sharp spat of applause that used to follow her public
performance. She would play a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands
would drop to her lap. And the silence of her own sitting room would
fall flat on her ears. It was better on the evenings when Orville was
home. He sang, in his throaty, fat man's tenor, to Terry's expert
accompaniment.

"This is better than playing for those bum actors, isn't it, hon?" And
he would pinch her ear.

"Sure"--listlessly.

But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termed
private life. She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was active in the
ladies' branch of the U.C.T. She developed a knack at cooking, too, and
Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel fare in small Wisconsin
towns, would come home to