No. No. What put such ideas into
your head?"

You see, he was shielding Emma way back there, and a typhoon of her
words was raging through his head:

"Oh, Henry, protect me against anyone ever saying--that. Promise me."

And now, with no sense of his terrible ruthlessness, he was protecting
her with her own daughter.

"Then, daddy, just one more thing," and her underlip caught while she
waited for answer. "There is no other reason except your own dear silly
one of loneliness--why you keep wanting me to put off my marriage?"

"No, baby," he said, finally, his words with no more depth than if his
body were a hollow gourd. "What else could there be?"

Immediately, and with all the resilience of youth, she was her happy
self again, kissing him through his mustache and on his now frankly bald
head, which gave off the incongruous odor of violet eau de Cologne.

"Old dude daddy!" she cried, and wanted to kiss his hands, which he held
suddenly very still and far from her reach.

Then the bell rang again and Fred Willis arrived. All the evening,
long after Henry lay on his deep-mattressed bed, staring, the little
apartment trilled to her laughter and the basso of Fred's.

* * * * *

A few weeks later there occurred a strike of the delivery men and truck
drivers of the city, and Henry, especially hard hit because of the
perishable nature of his product, worked early and late, oftentimes
loading the wagons himself and riding alongside of the precariously
driving "scab."

Frequently he was as much as an hour or two late to dinner, and upon one
or two occasions had tiptoed out of the house before the usual hour
when Ann opened her eyes to the consciousness of his breakfast to be
prepared.

They were trying days, the scheme of his universe broken into, and Henry
thrived on routine.

The third week of the strike there were street riots, some of them
directly in front of the fish store, and Henry came home after a day of
the unaccustomed labor of loading and unloading hampers of fish, really
quite shaken.

When he arrived Ann Elizabeth was cutting around the scalloped edge of
a doily with embroidery scissors, the litter of cut glass and silver
things out on the table and throwing up quite a brilliance under the
electric lamp, and from the kitchen the slow sizzle of waiting chops.

"Whew!" he said, as he entered, both from the whiff he emanated as he
shook out of his overcoat, and from a