“‘Yet twenty-three hundred for it is a monstrous outrage,’ says the old man, changing his voice just a mite.  ’Too well I know the cost of such repairs.  Fifteen hundred at most would make the place better than ever—­and to think that you, struggling along to keep up appearances on the little I give you, should be imposed upon by a crook that undoubtedly has the law on his side!  I could endure no thought of it, so I foiled him.’

“‘How?’ says young Angus, kind of alarmed.

“Angus, peer, yawned and got up.  ’It’s a long story and would hardly interest you,’ says he, moving over to the door.  ’Besides, I must be to bed against the morrow, which will be a long, hard day for me.’  His voice had tightened up.

“‘What have you done?’ demands Ellabelle passionately.

“‘Saved your son eight hundred dollars,’ says Angus, ’or the equivalent of his own earnings for something like eight hundred years at current prices for labour.’

“‘I’ve a right to know,’ says Ellabelle through her teeth and stiffening in her chair.  Young Angus just set there with his mouth open.

“‘So you have,’ says old Angus, and he goes on as crisp as a bunch of celery:  ’I told you I felt ingenious.  I’ve kept this money in the family by the simple device of taking the job.  I’ve engaged two other painters and decorators besides myself, a carpenter, an electrician, a glazier, and a few proletariats of minor talent for clearing away the wreckage.  I shall be on the job at eight.  The loafers won’t start at seven, as I used to.  Don’t think I’d see any son of mine robbed before my very eyes.  My new overalls are laid out and my valet has instructions to get me into them at seven, though he persists in believing I’m to attend a fancy-dress ball at some strangely fashionable hour.  So I bid you all good evening.’

“Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of herself since she was four years old or thereabouts.  Talk about the empress of stormy emotion!  For ten minutes the room sounded like a torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages.  But the doctor reached there at last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.

“And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, fills, was walking swiftly up and down for about one hour.  He made no speech like the night before.  He just walked and walked.  The part that struck me was that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of pleading old Angus out of his mad folly.  They both seemed to know the Scotch when it did break out.

“At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house.  The curtains to Ellabelle’s Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great agony.  Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car.  A few minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he would not be home to lunch.  Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him in a tin pail he’d bought the day before, with a little cupola on top for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.