“Oh, I did, Morty, I did.  It nearly broke my heart, and I just wanted to throw myself away—­become a trained nurse or go in for settlement work!”

“Couldn’t it ever be as it used to be?”

“I should want all the bushings of phosphor bronze.”

“They are that already—­and it’s patent-lock nutted throughout, and the engine is that new kind that interlocks.  I’ll draw it for you when I get home . . . and we’ll be married at the same time as Harry and Nelly.”

“And one of those French brass gasoline tanks that set flat against the dash-board and hold a two-gallon extra supply.”

“You shall have it!”

“But she said she had actually, seen the letter!”

“It was all a lie, every word of it,” he broke out.  “We’ll go straight to her now if you like and have it out, and then you’ll see whom to believe!  There never was any letter or anything, except that she made up her mind I was to have her niece whether I wanted to or not.  I told you that fifty million times in the letters you wouldn’t read and sent back unopened.  And it wasn’t the kind of message I could give anybody else to take to you.  I had to think of the girl, of course, and I know she liked me.”

“French tires, of course?”

“Every blessed thing just the way you want it.  The only thing I can’t see my way to change is the chauffeur, a poor devil named Truslow, who’s really an awful decent kind of fellow when you get to know him!”

“Oh, dear,” I said, “I never dreamed the Great Bubble Syndicate was going to end like this!”

“End?” cried Morty, putting his arm around my waist as though he now had a right to.  “It’s only the reorganization of a splendid old concern, and for fourteen hundred kisses I am going to let you in on the ground floor!”

COAL OIL JOHNNY

It was eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and on the veranda of Mrs. Hemingway’s house three young girls were gathered in conversation.  Below them a garden ran to the water’s edge and gave access to a wooden pier projecting some thirty or forty feet beyond.  Here, in a mimic harbor formed by a sharp turn of the shore and a line of piles on which the pier was supported, rode the Hemingway fleet at its moorings:  a big half-decked catboat, a gasoline launch, an Indian canoe and two trim gigs.  Here, too, under the kindly lee of a small boat-house, the Hemingway crew lay stretched in slumber, his head pillowed on an ancient jib, and his still-smoking pipe fallen from his unconscious lips.  A Hemingway puppy was stalking some Hemingway tomtits, in the bland, leisurely, inoffensive manner of one whose intentions were not serious; and the picture was completed by a Hemingway cat, with a blue ribbon round its neck, which was purring to itself in a serenity that a stray page of a Sunday supplement never yet afforded man.