Jonas Bubble, so far different from the one
he had planned to write. It was not like him to do this utterly
foolish thing, and yet, somehow, he felt that he could not do
otherwise. When he came back up-stairs again, the letter written and a
check inclosed in it and the whole mailed, he found her in the same
chair, but now she was crying. He approached her hesitantly and stood
looking down at her for a long, long time. It was, perhaps, but one
minute, but it seemed much longer. Now was the supreme test, the
moment that should influence all their future lives, and he dreaded to
dissolve that uncertainty.

He knelt beside her and put his arm about her. Still crying, she
turned to him, threw both arms around his neck and buried her head on
his shoulder--and as she cried she pressed him more tightly to her!

CHAPTER XXIV

CASTING ABOUT FOR A STRAIGHT BUSINESS, PATENT
MEDICINE PROVIDES THE ANSWER

That was a glorious honeymoon! They traveled from one gay summer
resort to another, and when Fannie expressed the first hint of
fatigue, Wallingford, who had grown to worship her, promptly provided
her with complete and unique rest, by taking her to some one of the
smaller inland cities of the type which he loved, installing her in a
comfortable hotel, and living, for a week or so, a quiet, lazy
existence consisting largely of mere eating and sleeping, and just
enough exercise to keep in good health. In all this time there was not
one jarring thought, one troubled moment, nor one hint of a shadow. J.
Rufus took his wife into all sorts of unique experiences, full of life
and color and novelty, having a huge pride in her constant wonder and
surprise.

It happened, while upon one of these resting sojourns, that they one
night paused on the edge of a crowd which stood gaping at a patent
medicine faker. Suddenly recognizing an old acquaintance in the
picturesque orator with the sombrero and the shoulder-length gray
hair, Wallingford drew closer.

Standing behind the "doctor," upon the seat of his carriage where the
yellow light of a gasolene torch flared full upon it, was a gaudy,
life-size anatomical chart, and with this as bait for his moths he was
extolling the virtues of Quagg's Peerless Sciatacata.

"Here, my friends," he declared, unfolding one of the many hinged
flaps of the gory chart, "you _bee_-hold the intimate relation of
the stomach with all the _inn_-ternal organs, and above all with
the blood, which, pu