“Perhaps you feel a little—­queer.  You look it,” suggested the young man, in a voice made anxious by an ever-ready sympathy.  “Can I do anything?  I am really very sorry to have spoken so.”

A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr.  He did feel a trifle queer.  A curious lightness—­a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy seemed to possess him.  He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent.  To his alarm it was beating playfully, skittishly.  No—­it was not even beating; it was skipping.

“Y-Yates,” he stammered, “you don’t think that I could p-possibly have become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine—­do you?”

Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future father-in-law might now be in.

“Yates,” repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, “tell me honestly:  do you think there is anything unusual the matter with me?  I—­I seem to f-feel unusually—­young.  Do I look it?  Have I changed?  W-watch me while I walk across the room.”

Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and fairly pranced across the room.  “Great Heavens!” he faltered; “my hat’s on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty!  Do you notice it, Yates?”

“I’m afraid I do, Mr. Carr.”

“This—­this is infamous!” gasped Mr. Carr.  “This is—­is outrageous!  I’m forty-five!  I’m a widower!  I detest a jaunty widower!  I don’t want to be one; I don’t want to——­”

Yates gazed at him with deep concern.

“Can’t you help lifting your legs that way when you walk—­as though a band were playing?  Wait, I’ll straighten your hat.  Now try it again.”

Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.

“I know I’m doing it again,” he groaned, “but I can’t help it!  I—­I feel so gay—­dammit!—­so frivolous—­it’s—­it’s that infernal machine.  W-what am I to do, Yates,” he added piteously, “when the world looks so good to me?”

“Think of your family!” urged Yates.  “Think of—­of Drusilla.”

“Do you know,” observed Carr, twirling his eyeglass and twisting his mustache, “that I’m beginning not to care what my family think!...  Isn’t it amazing, Yates?  I—­I seem to be somebody else, several years younger.  Somewhere,” he added, with a flourish of his monocle—­“somewhere on earth there is a little birdie waiting for me.”

“Don’t talk that way!” exclaimed Yates, horrified.

“Yes, I will, young man.  I repeat, with optimism and emphasis, that somewhere there is a birdie——­”

“Mr. Carr!”

“Yes, merry old Top!”

“May I use your telephone?”

“I don’t care what you do!” said Carr, gayly.  “Use my telephone if you like; pull it out by the roots and throw it over Cooper’s Bluff, for all I care!  But”—­and a sudden glimmer of reason seemed to come over him—­“if you have one grain of human decency left in you, you won’t drag me and my terrible plight into that scurrilous New York paper of yours.”