He had a chuckling sense of Whiting as the white-feathered Prince.  But Milly’s eyes were clouded.  “I don’t like to think that she shut the poor Fool out of the garden.”

For a moment he cupped her troubled face in his two hands.  “You dear kiddie.”  Then as he turned away he found his own eyes wet.

As he started up-stairs Pussy peeped out at him.

“Wouldn’t it be—­corking—­to see a Fluffy Ruffles doll—­a-walking up the street?”

In a beautiful box up-stairs the Fluffy Ruffles doll stared at him.  She was as lovely as a dream, and as expensive as they make ’em.  There was another doll in blue, also as expensive, also as lovely.  Ostrander could see Milly with the blue doll matching her eyes.

There were toys, too, for the baby.  And there was a bunch of violets.  And boxes of candy.  And books.  And there were things to eat.  Besides the fruits a great cake, and a basket of marmalades and jellies and gold-sealed bottles and meat pastes in china jars, and imported things in glass, and biscuits in tins.

Ostrander, after some consideration, opened the tin of biscuits and, munching, he wrote a note.  Having no paper, he tore a wrapper from one of the boxes.  He had the stub of a pencil, and the result was a scrawl.

     “MY DEAR WHITING: 

     “It was I who borrowed your car—­and who ran away with your junk.  I
     am putting my address at the head of this, so that if you want it
     back you can come and get it.  But perhaps you won’t want it back.

“I have a feeling that to you and your wife I am as good as dead.  If you have any thought of me it is, I am sure, to pity me.  Yet I rather fancy that you needn’t.  I am down and out, and living on ten dollars a month.  That’s all I got when the crash came—­it is all I shall ever get.  I pay four dollars a month for my room and twenty cents a day for food.  Sometimes I pay less than twenty cents when I find myself in need of other—­luxuries.  Yet there’s an adventure in it, Whiting.  A good little woman who lives in this house begs me to work.  But I have never worked.  And why begin?  I’ve a heritage of bad habits, and one does not wish to seem superior to one’s ancestors.

“The winters are the worst.  I spend the summers on the open road.  Ask Marion if she remembers the days when we read Stevenson together in the garden?  Tell her it is like that—­under the stars—­Tell her that I am getting more out of it than she is—­with you—­

“But the winters send me back to town—­and this winter Fate has brought me to an old house in a shabby street just a bit back from the Club.  On the first floor there is a little family.  Three kiddies and a young mother who works to keep the wolf from the door.  There’s a Pussy-Kiddie, and a Milly-Kiddie, and a baby, and they have adopted me as a friend.

     “And this Christmas I had nothing to give them—­but a red candle to
     light their room.