Mrs. Budlong remembered her husband's suggestion. She made a quick resolution to do or die. Her cheek was cold and white and her heart beat loud and fast, but she tried to set her double chin into a square jaw, and she passed Sally Swezey as if Sally Swezey were a lamp-post by the curb—a common lamp-post by the curb, and nothing more.

She heard Sally's gush of greeting stop short as if someone had turned a faucet in her throat; she heard a gulp; then she heard a strangled silence. Then she heard Sally call her name tentatively, tenderly, reproachfully. Then she heard no more. And she knew no more till her feet somehow carried her home. But she had hardly time to flop into a rocker and utter a prayer of gratitude and pride for having been vouchsafed the courage to snub a Carthaginian before Br-r-rr!—the relentless telephone was on her trail. She knew just who it was and she braced herself to meet one of Sally's sharp-tongued assaults. But Sally said—in part:

"Oh, you poor darling dear, is that you? and how are you now? I was So alarmed for you. You looked So ill and worn and—aren't the Christmas crowds awful this year? and nothing fit to buy and such prices! and—you must be just worn out. You really must spare yourself, for do you Know what you Did, dearest. You went right By me without Seeing me, or Answering me! Yes, you did! I was so startled that I didn't have brains enough to run after you and assist you home. I'm so glad you got there alive and I Do hope you're feeling better and I'm so aShamed of myself for letting you go all that way aLone in that pitiful conDition. Can you ever forGive me?"

When Mr. Budlong came home for luncheon, Mrs. Budlong told him the whole story. He glared at her with an I-give-you-up expression and growled:

"And when she said all that, what did you say?"

"I don't know." Mrs. Budlong faltered. "All I know is that she's coming over this afternoon with a lot of that wine jelly I gave her the receipt for."

"And what do you intend to do this time?" Mr. Budlong demanded. The skeptic in his tone stung her to revolt. She could usually be strong in the presence of her husband. She looked at least like Mrs. Boadicea as she said:

"I intend to tell Sally Swezey what you told me to. And I will accept no apologies, none whatever."

When Mr. Budlong came home to dinner she avoided his gaze. She confessed that she had changed her program. She hadn't the heart to insult poor Sally, and she had admitted that she was a hit dizzy and qualmish and she had—well, she—she—

Mr. Budlong finished for her fiercely:

"I know! You ate a lot of her wine jelly, and you told her she was a love and you kissed her good-by, and would she excuse you from coming to the door because you were still a little wobbly."

Mrs. Budlong looked at him in surprise: "She told you!"

"Nah! I haven't seen her."

"Then how on earth did you ever guess?" she babbled.

"It was my womanly intuition!" he snarled, and that evening he went down town and sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of hours. He usually did this anyway—in summer he sat on the sidewalk—but this evening, he did it with a certain implication of escape. He expressed renunciation in the mere shutting of the door.

On the way home Mr. Budlong was busy with schemes. His mind turned again to his son.

In a smallish town, a growing boy is an unfailing source of casus belli.

As an inciter of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan about Ulysses Budlong Junior. Nearly every day he had come charging into the house with bad news in some form or other. Some rock or snowball he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone through a window or a milk wagon or somebody's silk hat. Or he had pulled a small girl's hair, or taken the skates away from a helpless urchin. He had bad luck too in picking victims with belligerent big brothers.

Mr. Budlong recognized these desperado traits and he fully expected Ulysses Junior to make him the father of a convict. Suddenly now despair became hope. Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would promote Ulie's. The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr. Budlong would not yield to one defeat. He watched eagerly for the next misdemeanor of his young hopeless. He relied on him to embroil, as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.

But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses' shoulder. He even began to go to Sunday School—the Methodist this year because they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before. And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear that he would one day be the father of a parson.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again. She snubbed people right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness. She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor, and she sent no excuse. This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.

But Mrs. Teeple graciously assumed that she was ill and sent over the cut flowers off the table. And she hoped the poor dear would feel better soon.

A few days later Mrs. Budlong's pet Maltese kitten was done to nine deaths at once by the Disney's fox terrier. Mrs. Budlong mourned the kitten, but there was consolation in the thought that she could now cut the Disneys off her list.

Before she could get the kitten decently interred in the back yard, Mrs. Disney was at the front door. She flung her arms round Mrs. Budlong and wept, declaring that she had resolved to give the murderous terrier away to a farmer, and had already sent to Chicago for a pedigreed Angora to replace the Maltese. It would arrive the day before Christmas.