d. "Take
some of those tablets to quiet your nerves--"

Mr. Tescheron had no time for the taking of sedatives. He rushed away to
call Katie, the maid, and to telephone for a coach. When he returned,
his exasperation knew no bounds, for his good wife had not stirred from
her warm couch. This was too much. From that point Hosley received the
worst denunciations; his ferocity made the wife murderers of criminal
history and the cruel Roman emperors seem like mud-pie and croquet
efforts in this line of infamy. The entreaty was then renewed.

"Come, come, Marie, do not be foolish, my dear. Get up and get ready. I
have awakened Katie and she is here to help you pack a small steamer
trunk and a dress-suit case. Gabrielle! Gabrielle!"

"Yes, father, let us start," replied Gabrielle, and she entered her
mother's room, rosy and wide-awake, with her gown faultlessly arranged
and her hat on straight. Her fire-alarm father found her right there to
give him all the rope he needed to hang himself. Gabrielle's gloves were
on and buttoned. Her neatly rolled umbrella was under her left arm and
in her right hand she carried a new leather bag. There were no signs of
wonder in her face; perhaps a touch of sadness might have been noted as
she glanced at her poor mother in pity; but she was far above the
influences which agitated her father and drove him into precipitate
action. Gabrielle, with the assistance of the maid, soon persuaded Mrs.
Tescheron and prepared her for departure into that foreign land vaguely
situated on the map of the earth, as she remembered it. With heavy sighs
and gasps she told where things could be found and how Bridget, the
cook, was to feed the parrot. She would take the parrot, but she did not
know if the air of Hoboken agreed with birds. While undergoing the
process of hasty preparation, she remembered a number of things that
would need attention that morning, so it was necessary also to bring
Bridget in with a quilt around her--there being no time then for her to
dress--to take orders.

When the drowsy Bridget was hustled in to receive instructions, she was
not a tidy-looking cook, and until Mr. Tescheron withdrew, she kept the
quilt entirely over her head, for her womanly spirit had not yet been
stiffened to defiantly glare at man by those delicate touches--the
pasting on of her front hair-piece; the tying on of her back switch to
the diminutive stump of original tresses; the proper adjustment of her
dental