“As for you, sir!” Tom Price turned, towering.  “It is fortunate for you that I find my wife in this darned shebang.—­Any female policeman behind that door-girl?  Doctor?  Why, Doctor!  Say, doctor!  Dr. Denbigh!  What in thunder are you laughing at?”

The doctor’s sense of humor (a quality for which I must admit my dear husband is not so distinguished as he is for some more important traits) had got the better of him.  He put his hands in his pockets, threw back his handsome head, and then and there, in that sacred feminine vestibule, he laughed as no woman could laugh if she tried.

In the teeth of the door-girl, the clerk, and the proprietress, in the face of the chin lady and the poodle girl, I ran straight to Tom and put my arms around his neck.  At first I was afraid he was going to push me off, but he thought better of it.  Then I cried out upon him as a woman will when she has had a good scare.  “Oh, Tom!  Tom!  Tom!  You dear old precious Tom!  I told you all about it.  I wrote you a note about Dr. Denbigh and—­and everything.  You don’t mean to say you never found it?”

“Where the deuce did you leave it?” demanded Thomas Price.

“Why, I stuck it on your pin-cushion!  I pinned it there.  I pinned it down with two safety-pins.  I was very particular to.”

“Pin-cushion!” exploded Tom.  “A message—­an important message—­to a man—­on a pin-cushion!”

Then, with that admirable self-possession which has been the secret of Tom Price’s success in life, he immediately recovered himself.  “Next time, Maria,” he observed, with pitying gentleness, “pin it on the hen-coop.  Or, paste it on the haymow with the mucilage-brush.  Or, fasten it to the watering-trough in the square—­anywhere I might run across it.—­Doctor!  I beg your pardon, old fellow.—­Now madam, if you are allowed by law to get out of this blasted house I can’t get into, I will pay your bill, Maria, and take you to a respectable hotel.  What’s that one we used to go to when we ran down to see Irving?  I can’t think—–­Oh yes—­’The Holy Family.’”

“Don’t be blasphemous, Price, whatever else you are!” admonished the doctor.  He was choking with laughter.

“Perhaps it was ‘The Whole Family,’ Tom?” I suggested, meekly.

“Come to think of it,” admitted Tom, “it must have been ’The Happy Family.’  Get your things on, Mysie, and we’ll get out of this inhuman place.”

I held my head as high as I could when I came back through the lobby, with a stout chambermaid carrying my suit-case.  The clerk sniffed audibly; the proprietress met me with a granite eye; the lady with the three chins muttered something which I am convinced it would not have added to my personal happiness to hear; but I thought the girl with the lavender poodle watched me a little wistfully as I whirled away upon my husband’s big forgiving arm.

The doctor, who had really laughed until he cried, followed, wiping his merry eyes.  These glistened when on the sidewalk directly opposite the hotel entrance we met Elizabeth Talbert, who had arranged, but in the agitation of the morning I had entirely forgotten it, to come to see me at that very hour.