for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim

might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was,

he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he

used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and

reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work

repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a

tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made

her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in

the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at

me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl.

But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove

hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the

corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his

step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a