to wire you to come for me, Pudgy! And
then I thought I'd stay at their terrible hotel and come down and
surprise you, and you weren't home and they said you'd come here!"

"Yes!" Johnson Boller agreed.

"How could you leave our home, Pudgy-wudgy?" his darling asked
reprovingly.

"If I had stayed there another hour without my little chicky-biddy, I'd
have shot myself!" said Pudgy-wudgy. "Ask Anthony!" And here he looked
at Anthony and demanded: "Ain't we silly? Like a couple of kids!"

"You certainly are!" Anthony Fry rasped.

"You don't have to screw your face all up when you say it!" Mr. Boller
informed him, disengaging himself.

Beatrice laughed charmingly.

"You'll overlook it, Mr. Fry?" said she. "We've never been separated
before in all the----"

"Six months!" beamed Johnson Boller.

"--that we've been married!" finished his wife, squeezing his hand.

Followed a pause. Anthony had nothing whatever to say; after witnessing
an exhibition like that he never had anything to say for an hour or more
that a lady could hear. He stood, a cold, stately, disgusted figure,
surging internally, thanking every star in the firmament that he had
never laid himself open to a situation of that kind--and after a time
the inimical radiations from him reached Beatrice, for she laughed
uneasily.

"May I--may I fix my hair?" she asked. "And then we'll go home, Pudgy?"

"Yes, my love," purred Johnson Boller.

"Which is your room, pigeon-boy?" his bride asked.

So far as concerned Johnson Boller, Mary had been wafted out of this
world; all aglow with witless happiness, he pointed at the door as he
said:

"That one, Beetie-chicken."

Beatrice turned--and ten thousand volts shot through Anthony and caused
his hair to stand on end. His laugh, coming simultaneously, was a loud,
weird thing, splitting the still air.

"Your bedroom, Johnson!" he cried. "She means your _bedroom_!"

"Well--of course?" Beatrice said wonderingly.

"Well, that's down at the end of the corridor, dear madam," Anthony
smiled wildly, and went so far as to stay her by laying hands on her
arm. "Right down there--see? The open door. That's Johnson's room!"

Beatrice, distinctly startled, glanced at him and nodded and left.
Anthony, drawing the first real breath in a full minute, glared at his
friend in silence; but the morning's dread situation had slid from
Johnson Boller's shoulders as a drop of water from a duck's back. For a
second or two he ha