delayed replying. She did not want
to lie needlessly to Mern--she was willing to let him do imagining, too,
seeing how well it was working, to all appearances, in the cases of
Elsham and Crowley.

She had her own reasons for keeping withindoors in the daytime. The
matter of Rickety Dick was worrying her. He had seen her as a girl of
sixteen, worn with her vigils beside a sick mother; the light through
the area windows had been dim, and he had stumbled against chairs in the
room as if his vision were poor.

However, she discovered at the outset of her stay in Adonia that she had
become the object of old Dick's intent regard whenever he found
opportunity. He often trudged past the tavern on his errands; he dragged
slow steps and squinted and peered. Once she caught him peeping at her
through the open door of the dining room. She had feared some such
closer inspection and had drawn back her hair and twisted its waviness
into an unsightly pug; the moment she saw him she slipped into her mouth
a piece of spruce gum which an admiring woodsman had presented, and then
she chewed vigorously and slatted herself about in a tough manner. He
sighed and went away muttering.

He ventured another and a last sortie, as if he wanted to make an end of
his doubts. He also made a sensation.

Rickety Dick came to take dinner at the tavern!

He was in his best rig, with which he was accustomed to outfit himself
for the funerals of his old friends. There was a faded tail coat which
flapped against baggy gray trousers. A celluloid collar on a flannel
shirt propped up his wrinkled chin.

Martin Brophy stared at old Dick and then cast a look up at the office
clock, whose hands, like Dick's in the moment of mental stress, were
upraised on the stroke of twelve.

"Flagg dead?" inquired Brophy, unable otherwise to account for Dick's
absence from the big house at the dinner hour.

"No! Toothache! Can't eat to-day. He let me off to go to a burying."

"Whose?"

Old Dick shook his head and passed on into the dining room, peering hard
into the face of the waitress as he plodded toward her. "Burying!" he
muttered. "May as well make sure it's dead--and put it away."

Lida met him as she was meeting her other problems up there--boldly.

She leaned over him when he was seated and recited the daily bill of
fare. He did not take his eyes off her face, now close to his.

"Lida Kennard," he whispered, hoarsely, panting, pulling the hard collar
awa