casionally. Perhaps it seems odd to you
that men can be so crazy about such things, but I suppose sometimes you
have wanted things very, very much, and--oh!"

She paused, plainly confused by her tactlessness in suggesting to a member
of his profession the extremities to which one may be led by covetousness.

"Yes, miss," he remarked hastily; and he rubbed his nose with the back of
his hand, and grinned indulgently as he realized the cause of her
embarrassment. It crossed his mind that she might be playing a trick of
some kind; that her story, which seemed to him wholly fantastic and not at
all like a chronicle of the acts of veritable human beings, was merely a
device for detaining him until help arrived. But he dismissed this
immediately as unworthy of one so pleasing, so beautiful, so perfectly
qualified to be the mother of Shaver!

"Well, just before luncheon, without telling my husband where I was going,
I ran away to papa's, hoping to persuade him to end this silly feud. I
spent the afternoon there and he was very unreasonable. He feels that Mr.
Talbot wasn't fair about that Philadelphia purchase, and I gave it up and
came home. I got here a little after dark and found my husband had taken
Billie--that's our little boy--and gone. I knew, of course, that he had
gone to _his_ father's hoping to bring him round, for both our fathers are
simply crazy about Billie. But you see I never go to Mr. Talbot's and my
husband never goes--Dear me!" she broke off suddenly. "I suppose I ought
to telephone and see if Billie is all right."

The Hopper, greatly alarmed, thrust his head forward as she pondered this.
If she telephoned to her father-in-law's to ask about Billie, the jig
would be up! He drew his hand across his face and fell back with relief as
she went on, a little absently:--

"Mr. Talbot hates telephoning, and it might be that my husband is just
getting him to the point of making concessions, and I shouldn't want to
interrupt. It's so late now that of course Roger and Billie will spend the
night there. And Billie and Christmas ought to be a combination that would
soften the hardest heart! You ought to see--you just ought to see Billie!
He's the cunningest, dearest baby in the world!"

The Hopper sat pigeon-toed, beset by countless conflicting emotions. His
ingenuity was taxed to its utmost by the demands of this complex
situation. But for his returning suspicion that Muriel was leading up to
something; that she w