Mr. Ducker had adroitly drawn the conversation to a general discussion of children.  He knew that Mr. Evans’s weak point was his little son Algernon.

“That’s a clever looking little chap of yours, Evans,” he had remarked carelessly as they came up the street.  (Mr. Ducker had never seen the czar closely.) “My wife was just saying the other day that he has a wonderful forehead for a little fellow.”

“He has,” the other man said smiling, not at all displeased.  “It runs clear down to his neck!”

“He can hardly help being clever if there’s anything in heredity,” Mr. Ducker went on with infinite tact, feeling his rainbow dreams of responding to toasts at Elk banquets drawing nearer and nearer.

Then the Evil Genius of the House of Ducker awoke from his slumber, sat up and took notice!  The house that the friend in Winnipeg had selected for them fell into irreparable ruins!  Poor Maudie’s automobile vanished at a touch.  The rosy dreams of Cincinnatus, and of carrying the grand old Conservative banner in the face of the foe turned to clay and ashes!

They turned the corner, and came upon Mary McSorley who sat on the back step with the czar in her arms.  Mary’s head was hidden as she kissed the czar’s fat neck, and in the general babel of voices, within and without, she did not hear them coming.

“Speaking about heredity,” Mr. Ducker said suavely, speaking in a low voice, and looking at whom he supposed to be the latest McSorley, “it looks as if there must be something in it over there.  Isn’t that McSorley over again?  Low forehead, pug nose, bulldog tendencies.”  Mr. Ducker was something of a phrenologist, and went blithely on to his own destruction.

“Now the girl is rather pleasant looking, and some of the others are not bad at all.  But this one is surely a regular little Mickey.  I believe a person would be safe in saying that he would not grow up a Presbyterian.”—­Mr. Evans was the worshipful Grand Master of the Loyal Orange Lodge, and well up in the Black, and this remark Mr. Ducker thought he would appreciate.

“McSorley will never be dead while this little fellow lives,” Mr. Ducker laughed merrily, rubbing his hands.

The czar looked up and saw his father.  Perhaps he understood what had been said, and saw the hurt in his father’s face and longed to heal him of it; perhaps the time had come when he should forever break the goo-goo bonds that had lain upon his speech.  He wriggled off Mary’s knee, and toddling uncertainly across the grass with a mighty mental conflict in his pudgy little face, held out his dimpled arms with a glad cry of “Daddy-dinger!”

That evening while Mrs. Ducker and Maudie were busy fanning Mr. Ducker and putting wet towels on his head, Mr. Evans sat down to write.

“Some more of that tiresome election stuff, John,” his pretty little wife said in disappointment, as she proudly rocked the emancipated czar to sleep.