“Minx! hussy!” he ejaculated.  “All that tall talk—!  Probably got it from some man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot.  Did she poke this in here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman?  I like her nerve!” He wondered whether he might have been breathing audibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains.  He was conscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep.  He dressed as fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room, glared at the slipper.  If the porter should start to make up his berth in his absence—­He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and thrust it into his bag.  He escaped from the train without seeing his tormentor again.

Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless, thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet.  He found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening.  Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment.  When he got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from prying clerks.

* * * * *

McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow!  He still goes to the office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed—­“morbid,” they call his state of mind.  He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut down because they remind him of cemeteries.  On Sundays or holidays, when the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his desk and looks at it.  Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his pine-trees suggested death—­life and youth.  When he drops over some day, his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.

As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.

Scandal

Kitty Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cords which defied the throat specialist.  Week after week her name was posted at the Opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of one of her rivals was substituted.  For nearly two months she had been deprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and had been shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her and the world, and the wintry stretch of the Park they looked out upon.  She was losing a great deal of money, and, what was worse, she was losing life; days of which she wanted to make the