Sometimes she reflected uneasily that Mamma’s affairs were only temporarily settled, after all, and sometimes George made her heart sink with uncompromising statements regarding the future, but for the most part Mary’s natural sunniness kept her cheerful and unapprehensive.

Almost unexpectedly, therefore, the crash came.  It came on a very hot day, which, following a week of delightfully cool weather, was like a last flaming hand-clasp from the departing summer.  It was a Monday, and had started wrong with a burned omelette at breakfast, and unripe melons.  And the one suit George had particularly asked to have cleaned and pressed had somehow escaped Mary’s vigilance, and still hung creased and limp in the closet.  So George went off, feeling a little abused, and Mary, feeling cross, too, went slowly about her morning tasks.  Another annoyance was when the telephones had been cut off; a man with a small black bag mysteriously appearing to disconnect them, and as mysteriously vanishing when once their separated parts lay useless on the floor.  Mary, idly reading, and comfortably stretched on a couch in her own room at eleven o’clock, was disturbed by the frantic and incessant ringing of the front doorbell.

“Lizzie went in to Broadway, I suppose,” she reflected uneasily.  “But I oughtn’t to go down this way!  Let him try again.”

“He”—­whoever he was—­did try again so forcibly and so many times that Mary, after going to the head of the kitchen stairs to call Lizzie, with no result, finally ran down the main stairway herself, and gathering the loose frills of her morning wrapper about her, warily unbolted the door.

She admitted George, whose face was dark with heat, and whose voice rasped.

“Where’s Lizzie?” he asked, eying Mary’s negligee.

“Oh, dearie—­and I’ve been keeping you waiting!” Mary lamented.  “Come into the dining-room, it’s cooler.  She’s marketing.”

George dropped into a chair and mopped his forehead.

“No one to answer the telephone?” he pursued, frowning.

“It’s disconnected, dear.  Georgie, what is it?—­you look sick.”

“Well, I am, just about!” George said sternly.  Then, irrelevantly, he demanded:  “Mary, did you know your mother had disposed of her Sunbright shares?”

“Sold her copper stock!” Mary ejaculated, aghast For Mamma’s entire income was drawn from this eminently safe and sane investment, and Mary and George had never ceased to congratulate themselves upon her good fortune in getting it at all.

“Two months ago,” said George, with a shrewdly observant eye.

Mary interpreted his expression.

“Certainly I didn’t know it!” she said with spirit.

“Didn’t, eh?  She says you did,” George said.

“Mamma does?” Mary was astounded.

“Read that!” Her husband flung a letter on the table.