Bill Watson came in first.

“Vell,” said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the joke-maker, “haf you guessed him?  ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?’”

“Er—­why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin.  “I think so, Mr. Hildebrant—­the one that lives the longest—­ Is that right?”

“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently.  “You haf not guessed der answer.”

Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.

In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco—­pale, melancholy, hopeless.

“Vell,” said Hildebrant, “haf you guessed him?  ’Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?’”

Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye.  Should he curse this mountain of pernicious humor—­curse him and die?  Why should—­ But there was Laura.

Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and stood.  His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave’s card.  He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a crawling fly.  There was written on it in Quigg’s bold, round hand:  “Good for one roast chicken to bearer.”

Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.

“A dead one!” said he.

“Goot!” roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee.  “Dot is right!  You gome at mine house at 8 o’clock to der party.”

XVI

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON

There are no more Christmas stories to write.  Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life.  Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources—­facts and philosophy.  We will begin with—­whichever you choose to call it.

Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions.  Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end.  We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep.  Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why.  Thus we call out of the rat-trap.  As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.

Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.

On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll.  There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure.  The child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.