home to bed. Mrs. Larrabee apologized to Heaven for doubting its watchfulness, commended Asaph Shillaber to its attention, and bespoke for him a special invoice of blessings.

And Asaph went home to his midday dinner as cheerfully as if he had received them. First he announced the good word about Meldrum's leniency, which Josie greeted with:

"You see! I told you that the party would be the proper caper. Maybe after this you'll believe that your wife knows a thing or two."

Asaph assured her that he would never doubt that she knew at least that much. Then, like the wag he was, he said that he had added a new clerk to his staff–a lady and a beauty, whose charms would draw no end of custom to the store and dazzle the drummers from far and near.

Josie's facile temper flashed at once into glow. One of her chief interests in the Bazar had been to make sure that it never harbored any saleswoman whose beauty could possibly lure her husband's mind from his ledgers or his home ties. Under the pretext of purchases or suggestions she made frequent tours of inspection, and if a girl too young or a pair of eyes too bright gleamed behind a counter Asaph heard of it at once. Some years before he had bowed to the inevitable and made it a rule to engage no woman who could imaginably disturb Josie's delicate equipoise.

Meldrum had noticed the strange array and had been inclined to impute the decline of the store's prosperity to the appearance of its staff.

"Good Lord, Ase!" he had groaned. "What you got here–the overflow of the Home for Aged and Indignant Females? You've collected a bunch of clock-stoppers that makes a suffragette meeting look like a Winter Garden chorus. People like those can't sell pretty things. Send 'em all to the bone-yard and get in some winners."

Asaph promised, and Meldrum promised to arrange an extension of credit. But Asaph would have feared bankruptcy less than such a step. As soon as Meldrum was gone he put the cap-sheaf to his little army of relicts and remnants by engaging Debby Larrabee! She made the rest look handsome by contrast.

She was the joke that he tried to spring on his wife. Josie took the allusion seriously, and Asaph was soon trying to hold her down.

"Wait! Wait till you hear who it is!" he pleaded; but she stormed on:

"I don't care who it is. I'm not going to have 

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