check for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I simply can't go to another ball."

"Where's your trousseau?"

"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."

"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your mother and I--"

"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more friend of mine is married--"

He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say:

"Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when the time comes and you have no gift from us."

But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold out almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina something she simply couldn't do without.

It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth. Particularly to Elizabeth.

Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart, never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might keep her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and wholesomeness of her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes, as she sat reading or sewing, with the light behind her shining through her soft hair, he saw in her a purity that was almost radiant.

He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited Elizabeth to go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:

"The house was gayer when Nina was at home."

"Yes. And you were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young idiots. Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the verandah, cigar-ashes--my cigars--and cigarettes over everything, and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in my life."He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once. 

"What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?" 

"I think he's in love with her, Walter." 

"Love? Any of the Sayre tribe? Jim Sayre drank himself to death, and this boy is like him. And 

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