"Hae ye no mercy on yon phone, bairnie," observed Jean, rolling cut-cakes at a side-table, an afternoon or so later, "skirlin' itsel' sick in the corner there. If it's yon grocery-man, tell him from me he's gone daft, an' I'll be changin' oor custom if he's no more canny with thae orders, like."

Daisy came out of one of the moods of pensiveness into which she had been in the habit of falling, lately, since the junior master of the house had inaugurated his policy of "putting her where she belonged." Skipping over, she took the phone from the hook.

"Hello!" she said; "Waghorn's grocery?"

"Not this time, stranger," said a dry voice at the other end of the line; "but you've got two more guesses, if you like."

Two dimples sprang into view near the corners of Daisy's mouth, and a fine blush spread right to where the receiver rested against her ear. "I doubt it's no the grocery-man," murmured Jean, glancing over her shoulder as she laid a wafer of light, white dough in the bake-pan that stood, larded and ready, at her right.

"One guess'll do," said Daisy, into the phone; "it's you."

"Correct," certified the voice of Jimmy Knight, the jitney-driver.

Then followed a conversation of which, though the half of it could not of course be heard from Jean's post at the dough-board, the tenor was plainly discernible in Daisy's registry of dimplings, and tiltings of the head, and teasing pauses; and the final softly-yielded, "All right, I will,—bye-bye," as she hung up the phone.

When Jimmy Knight had called her "stranger" through the transmitter, this had merely been humorous irony; for Daisy Nixon and the young man who had first piloted her to the Harrison house, and later to the dancing pavilion at the park, had seen each other at least once, and very often twice, each week since.

On the evening after the telephone conversation just mentioned, Daisy, as she walked in her brisk, virile way to the trysting-place under the trees by the stone drive-gate, wishing that housemaids could afford suits instead of having to wear waists and skirts, knew that she was going to spend the evening at "a friend's house"; but she did not know that the friend was Jimmy's married sister, Mrs. Tom Farrell. Nor did she know that Jimmy had, in advance, instructed Mrs. Farrell something like this: "Now, Bet, this evening you'll have the chance o' your life to help little Jimmy pull off something. Clean up the suite—yes, yes, of course I know you always do have it clean, honey; but I mean, clean it extra good, to-night—and spruce yourself up, and see that Tom gets his semi-annual haircut and has a clean sweater on; and fix little Tommy up real cute. You see, it's this way: I'm going to bring a girl around with me to-night—the best girl in——"

"M'h'm," Mrs. Betty Farrell had yawned, into the telephone, "go on—shoot. I got something else to do than stand with this phone to my ear, Jim, and listen to you rave."

"You sure have, Bet," Jimmy soothed; "I know that. Well, as I say, I'm bringing this girl around, and I want her to get the home idea. See?—the home idea! Then she'll be all ready for the proposition I intend to spring, on the way home——"

"Since when," interrupted the practical voice at the other end of the line, "have you started your bank account, Jimmy?"

"Sa-ay, that's a nasty one," Jimmy had protested; "what do you want to spring a thing like that on me for, Bet, when you know how I hate banks. I draw down twenty-five a week, as you know, and I'll slap on some accident insurance, and we'll rent furnished apartments——"

"Better wait till she says 'yes'," Mrs. Farrell had advised, as she prepared to 'hang up', "before you start counting your chickens. She may not care to take a chance on you. I know how I'd feel about it, if it was me. However, I'll do my best for you."

Jimmy, who was quite ready to admit any time that he was "no hand with girls," shoved his hat to one side, thrust his hands into his pockets, and spat aside as, waiting outside the Harrison gate, he saw Daisy approach along the gravel walk.

If he had come for her in the jitney, as usual, to take her for a companionable hour's ride up and down his round, as a "free" and welcome passenger, he would have felt at ease; for he had become used to that. But this waiting, with no friendly engine pounding away in front of him and no familiar steering-wheel to lean his hands upon, was enough out of the ordinary to have embarrassed Jimmy anyway, even without the mental consciousness of his deep-laid matrimonial plot, and the feeling he could not shake off that somehow Daisy might sense it prematurely and flee.

"'Lo, stranger," said Daisy, softly, taking the words out of Jimmy's mouth, as it were. She was a little shy, too; but Jimmy Knight was too busy with his own perturbation to notice that.

"H'lo yourself," he responded, with something like gruffness, "and see how you like it." As they dropped into step side by side, he added, with an inspired flash, "Lookin' kind of skookum to-night, us, Friend Nixon."

"I might if I had a suit on," Daisy said, in her forthright way, "but suits cost money."

"Never mind," Jimmy, in spite of the playful breeze abroad, strove to pull his new straw hat down more firmly on its elastic cushion of virile, curly hair, "you may have one, soon."

Daisy, who had not meant this at all, cast a quick side-glance at her companion.

"I wouldn't take a suit from you, if that's what you mean," she said, abruptly, flushing a little.

"There, now," Jimmy blushed an honest, vivid red, "I've went and made a break, first crack at the bat. Say, you do the talkin' from here on. I'll just listen. If I don't say nothin', I can't make nobody mad, can I?"

Jimmy Knight's married sister lived in a three-room suite, in an apartment block not far from the Commercial Hotel—that structure from whose windows Daisy had had her first view of the city's rooftops. As she followed her companion up the three flights of stairs, her mind reverted to that girl-wife she had seen from the hotel-window, hanging out a washing for three, and pinning the tinier garments in the centre of the clothesline.

"Come right in, people," invited Mrs. Tom Farrell, opening the door of Suite 30, as Jimmy, smiling humorously aside at Daisy, knocked like a bailiff; "You're as big an ike as ever, Jim. If you've waked young Tommy up, you'll go in and put him to sleep again. Mind that!"

Mrs. Tom was a pleasant-looking girl, a year or so older than Daisy, with a pretty mouth and a few freckle-dots on forehead and nose. Her hair was as red as Jimmy's was brown. She led the way along a short vestibule to the living-room.

"Tom's in the bathroom, having a shave," she said, with a kind of under-glance at Daisy; "I couldn't budge him out of his chair till I told him Jim was bringing a girl around, and then you couldn't see him for dust. All husbands is tarred with the same brush. Don't you ever get married, Miss——"

"Miss nothin'," said Jimmy, as they entered the neat room, with its "surface oak" centre-table, and buffet adorned with a cut-glass vase (a wedding present) filled with flowers contributed by the park gardener, who had a suite in the basement; "friend of the family, didn't I tell you, Bet. Name's Daisy, and she is one."

Jimmy was more at ease, in this familiar precinct. As his sister took Daisy's hat and went to put it in the bedroom, the two callers heard her remark, vigorously, to some object in an invisible corner, "Go off to sleep this minute, you! The idea!"

But the object only responded, wakefully, "Unk Dimmy! I wanna dinka wa'r."

"You want a spankin'," said his mother, reprehensively, "and you're going to get it. Don't bring him any water, Jim—he'll have the city waterworks dry, if he keeps on. It's the only excuse he can think of, for keepin' awake."

Jimmy, however, was at the faucet, with a glass of water half drawn. Carrying this, he dove into the bedroom as his sister came out.

"Might as well talk to the wind," said Mrs. Tom Farrell, "as them two. Well, of all——"

This last as Jimmy reappeared, carrying a sleepy three-year-old who, supporting the tumbler with two hands that had hollows where knuckles should be, was quaffing with all his might. Jimmy Knight had had an inspiration, which he was not yet sure was not a blunder, to show Daisy how a baby "became" him.

To Daisy, in spite of its neatness, the suite looked rather small and dingy. This impression formed itself quite unconsciously, not as the result of deliberate glances about. Probably it was a wholly involuntary comparison of these small rooms to the big garish apartments of the Harrison house, to which her eyes had grown accustomed during the past couple of months. At any rate, the impression came and stayed. Jimmy, however, had no means of knowing this; and, as he glanced around at his sister's handiwork, he winked his appreciation at Mrs. Betty behind young Tommy's head; and shaped with his lips this soundless but energetic sentence, "You're a winner, hon'."

Tom Farrell, Senior, came from the bathroom presently, stroking a long, new-shaven chin. His eyes were narrowed sociably, and his mouth, as he approached Daisy, was kinked up at the corners in what seemed to Betty Farrell's critical regard, almost an ecstasy of friendliness. He paused, with the hand of greeting half-outstretched; then, tetering his shoulders a little, glanced first at his wife, and from her to Jimmy, interrogatively.

"Somebody introduce me," interpreted his wife, with considerable warmth and sarcasm, "or I'll go crazy."

"Daisy, meet Brother Tom," interposed Jimmy, diplomatically, as he saw a flash of temper in the glance Tom Farrell darted at his wife. A husband of four years' standing will not endure being put out of countenance before a pretty girl.

"Howdy," said Farrell, promptly; grabbing Daisy's hand and half for his wife's benefit and half because of Daisy's dimples, squeezing it hard and long; "howdy, howdy?... Say, Bet, what's that kid doing out of bed, this time o' night? Don't you know nothing at all? Get him back between them sheets, right away!"

"Put him to bed yourself, if you're so keen about it," Betty Farrell retorted, hotly; "it was Jimmy brought him out here, not me. Why don't you take a round out of Jim?"

"I said, put him to bed," Tom Farrell was losing his self-control as his temper rose, "and do it quick!"

"Come along, Boy," said Jimmy Knight, genially, speaking into the ear of Tommy, Junior; then winking at Daisy as he jerked his head in humorous apology toward the point where Tom and Betty Farrell glared at each other across the centre-table, "we'll go and pound our ear, son. We don't need a house to fall on us, to show us we ain't wanted, do we?" He got up, young Tom in his arms, and moved toward the bedroom.

"No, sir-ree!" Tom Farrell's long arm came out and scooped out of Jimmy's grasp the youngster, who started to cry; "it's got to be settled right here an' now who's boss of this establishment. I ain't goin' to let no woman run on me. Here, Bet—take this kid, and put him to bed like I told you!" The husband was now so far beside himself that he, for the moment, neither knew nor cared what impression he made. As he spoke, he held out the baby boy, who yelled and kicked vigorously.

But Betty Farrell backed away, letting young Tommy dangle from his father's outstretched arms.

"I don't have to take no orders from you," she said, putting her hands obstinately behind her back, "and I won't, not if you rave till you're blue in the face. I'll show everybody how much authority you have over me."

At this, young Tom felt himself set down hard on a chair. Tom Farrell, having thus freed his hands, hopped ragingly across the room and slapped his wife on the side of the face. Betty, true to the color of her hair, flared up, looked about for something to throw, and swept her hand with temper's wastefulness toward the cut-glass vase in the centre of the table.

"Hey!" Jimmy Knight reached across and rescued the vase; "you ain't mad five dollars' worth, surely, Bet." Then the brother got up and came around the table.

"Break away, break away," he said, casting a deprecating grin toward Daisy as he put one hand on his sister's shoulder and the other on Tom Farrell's chest, and pushed the two apart; "hittin' in the clinches is barred, boys. How about a little card-game, everybody? Bet and me will take on Daisy and you, Tom, and beat yous flat."

"Nothing doing," Farrell nasalled, closing his eyes and rocking his head from side to side in an obdurate negative; "this here thing's got to be settled first. Let a woman get the upper hand of you once, an' you'll never get her back in her place."

"Aw, go on, Bet," Jimmy gave his sister a little coaxing nudge, "put the kid to bed."

Betty Farrell raised eyelids, nose, chin and right foot, and brought them all down simultaneously.

"I—wun't!" she said; "so there."

This repetition of her refusal, though not this time addressed to him, brought Tom Farrell's wrath again to boiling-point, and he reached across and cuffed her twice more. Jimmy Knight's hand, which was still resting against his brother-in-law's chest, pushed Farrell firmly back.

"Don't do that no more, Tom," he said, his face and voice sobering a little.

"Why not?" flamed Farrell, turning on him.

"Well," said Jimmy, "I can't stand by and see you do it—that's all."

Farrell grew hoarse and purple. "Well, come on, then," he frogged, "I'll take on the whole blamed family, and lick 'em with one hand tied behind me." With this, his arm shot out; and Jimmy, taken unawares, received the blow full in the eye. Farrell followed quickly with a second thrust; but Jimmy was ready, and the fist glanced harmlessly.

"I don't want to fight you, Tom," he said, guarding himself with fair skill, as the brother-in-law, shoving the table aside with a jerk of his hip, pursued the attack furiously; "All I say is, be reasonable."

"Reasonable, nothin'!" croaked Farrell, as he landed again, cutting Jimmy's cheek with his thumb-nail; "I'll learn you to keep out, next time."

Jimmy did not answer. His lips tightened a little. Farrell, breaking through his guard again, struck the fast-blackening eye which had received his opening blow. Thereat Jimmy, with a vigorous shake of his shoulders, dived in manfully. There was a brief scuffle; then Jimmy's sinewy fist twinkled up hard, at short range, and Tom Farrell went down flat on the floor and lay there.

"Now, then!" the voice was Betty Farrell's; but it was addressed to Jimmy, not to her husband, this time; "see what you've done, with your dirty fists and your meddling. You've knocked him out—maybe hurt him—"

"He's all right," said Jimmy, a little sheepishly, "I—I never meant—there, he's stirring, now. I——"

"Well, get out, then," Betty Farrell dashed over and nervously opened the door leading out of the suite into the corridor; "go on—get out! I don't want no more fighting in here. Go on—you, too," this last to Daisy who, however, was already at the door.

Jimmy glanced at Daisy as humorously as a man might who had one supremely black eye and a cheek all over blood.

"I guess p'raps we might as well," he said.

There was silence on the way down the three flights of stairs, and comparative uncommunicativeness on Jimmy's part until the end of the walk home was reached and the two stood under the trees just within the Harrison drive-gate.

Then Jimmy, clearing his throat with the air of a man who has made up his mind to say something or die, observed, "I—I got to tell you one blamed good joke, Friend Nixon, before you go in."

"What?" said Daisy.

"Well," said Jimmy, "I—gr-r-h'm—I took you over there to-night to show you a happy little home in a three-room suite. As she turns out, however, that'n ain't so very happy to-night, huh? All my fault, for hikin' young Tom out of his crib."

"Oh, well," said Daisy, "everybody fights, sometimes."

"Yes, that's so," said Jimmy; "Yes, that's—that's so. But I—I—"

"'M?" said Daisy, feeling something in her companion's cadence that caused a soft little titillation of her nerves. She drew back further into the shadow as she felt her cheeks grow involuntarily warm.

"I know two of a kind—both of 'em easy-goin', I mean—that mightn't fight any more than oncet a week, at the outside. Do you think you could stand for that, Friend Nix—Friend Daisy?"

Daisy drew a long breath, raised her face, and looked clear-eyed at her companion.

"I know what you mean," she said, glad that the darkness prevented cheerful, curly-headed Jimmy Knight from seeing the shine of her glance and the color of her cheeks, "but I can't. Not the way I feel these days. What happened over in the suite to-night didn't make any difference. But—well, I just can't. I'm a funny girl."

"You sure are," agreed Jimmy Knight; "how long did you say you'd need to think it over?"

"Forever," said Daisy, firmly, in spite of the beating of her heart.

"All right," responded Jimmy Knight, bravely choking down a certain obstruction that had risen in his throat, "I'll give you a day longer than that, so's it won't look as if I was rushin' you. Well—so-long, kid," he held out his hand.

"Good-bye, Jimmy Knight," Daisy gave him her hand, then drew it away gently, and ran in-doors with tears in her eyes.