fixed out the window in
a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently
weeping.

"I wonder," said Mr. Peters to himself, "if there'd be anything in
it."

The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren
back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might
have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face
to besieging spring. But spring doesn't come with the thunder of
cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

"I'll try it," said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.

"Clara, darling," he said in tones that shouldn't have fooled a
baby seal, "why should we have hard words? Ain't you my own tootsum
wootsum?"

A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid.
Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and
utterance of two of Love's holiest of appellations.

But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the
back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was
ridiculous, and yet-- Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir
and all of us, are in it.

Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her
arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have
striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his
arms were bound to his sides.

"Do you love me, James?" asked Mrs. Peters.

"Madly," said James, "but--"

"You are ill!" exclaimed Mrs. Peters. "Why are you so pale and tired
looking?"

"I feel weak," said Mr. Peters. "I--"

"Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I'll be back in a minute."

With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the
Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.

"All right," he confided to the ceiling. "I've got her going. I
hadn't any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib.
Well, sir; ain't I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What?
It's a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went
out for. I guess she's gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor,
that we're reconciled. I'll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was
talking about slugging her!"

Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.

"I'm glad I happened to have that dollar," she said. "You'