een
accounted rich, men who had been rich, heard the approach of the
fearsome twain and trembled. And what shall be said of their
dependents, the small fry, earners of salaries, young men of the
professions, who saw incomes curtailed or cut off; to whom frank
poverty would have been almost a relief but who must, as habit and the
custom, of their kind decreed, keep up their sham and shabby gentility?

Business was at a standstill. The city ceased to expand. There was no
building. Dick Holden closed his desk and locked his office door.

"There'll be nothing doing in our line for some while. I'm going to
Europe for two or three months to learn something about architecture.
Better pack up your family and come along, Davy."

David laughed grimly. "My Dickybird, you're quite a joker."

Trips to Europe!--when the apartment was a miniature hospital. Davy
Junior was sickly. Shirley's strength came back slowly. For six weeks
the trained nurse stayed, ordering expensive things for her patients.

Anxiously David saw his scanty resources dwindling fast. One by one
his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of
household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the
commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was
his contractor client and owed him five hundred dollars. But Fisher
always put him off.

In the meantime the dairy lunch became a habit. He smoked only a pipe
now. The books he loved and needed, little things he used to think
were necessaries, were foregone. He thought wistfully of the
indulgences he might have gone without in the past.

Fisher continued to put him off. Then Worry began to shadow David by
day, to share his pillow at night. If Fisher, like so many others,
should fail--! But with an effort he concealed the unbidden guest from
Shirley. With her he was always cheery, ready with quip and laugh,
teasing her over her devotion to that red-faced bit of humanity, hight
Davy Junior. And in truth, the sight of her, still weak and fragile
but happy in the possession of her baby, would give him a fresh
courage. Things _couldn't_ happen to hurt her, he assured himself.
For her, for them; he would weather the storm--somehow. "Why," thus he
would snub intrusive Worry, "we've got Fisher, anyhow. When he pays,
we'll simply _make_ it last until business picks up." . . . .

The doctor's bill and word that Fisher had gone into bankruptcy reache