father. Carrie will you have me?"

"Oh, Louis--Loo!"

"Carrie, my dear!"

And so it was that Carrie Samstag and Louis Latz came into their
betrothal.

None the less, it was with some misgivings and red lights burning high
on her cheek-bones that Mrs. Samstag, at just after ten that evening,
turned the knob of the door that entered into her little sitting-room,
but in this case, a room redeemed by an upright piano with a green silk
and gold-lace shaded floor lamp glowing by it. Two gilt-framed
photographs and a cluster of ivory knickknacks on the white mantel. A
heap of hand-made cushions. Art editions of the gift-poets and some
circulating library novels. A fireside chair, privately owned and drawn
up, ironically enough, beside the gilded radiator, its head rest worn
from kindly service to Mrs. Samstag's neuralgic brow.

From the nest of cushions in the circle of lamp glow, Alma sprang up at
her mother's entrance. Sure enough she had been reading and her cheek
was a little flushed and crumpled from where it has been resting in the
palm of her hand.

"Mama," she said, coming out of the circle of light and switching on the
ceiling bulbs, "you stayed down so late."

There was a slow prettiness to Alma. It came upon you like a little
dawn, palely at first and then pinkening to a pleasant consciousness
that her small face was heart-shaped and clear as an almond, that the
pupils of her gray eyes were deep and dark like cisterns and to young
Leo Friedlander, rather apt his comparison, too, her mouth was exactly
the shape of a small bow that had shot its quiverful of arrows into his
heart.

And instead of her eighteen she looked sixteen. There was that kind of
timid adolescence about her, yet when she said, "Mama, you stayed down
so late," the bang of a little pistol-shot was back somewhere in her
voice.

"Why--Mr. Latz--and I--sat and talked."

An almost imperceptible nerve was dancing against Mrs. Samstag's right
temple. Alma could sense, rather than see the ridge of pain.

"You're all right, mama?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Samstag, and plumped rather than sat herself down on a
divan, its naked greenness relieved by a thrown scarf of black velvet,
stenciled in gold.

"You shouldn't have remained down so long if your head is hurting," said
her daughter, and quite casually took up her mother's beaded hand-bag
where it had fallen in her lap, but her fingers feeling lightly and
furtively as if for the shape of its cont