In reply to her letter to her brother-in-law, Margaret received from him, a week later, a telegram that puzzled her greatly.


Charleston, S.C.

Important Berkeley estate business brings me to New Munich Thursday, February tenth.

WALTER.


She had ten days before his coming to anticipate with some uneasiness the shock he would certainly get in making the acquaintance of her husband's sisters and in seeing the kind of home she lived in.

"If only I could dispose of that navy blue owl on the sideboard!" she worried. "And of all that imitation onyx in the parlour! And the 'oil-paintings' in the sitting-room! As for Jennie and Sadie themselves—— Oh, what can Walter be coming here for? I don't suppose they've discovered coal on our estate. I hope not, such a dirty mess as it would make! More like our luck to discover we don't, after all, own the place."

But she found, when she announced her brother-in-law's prospective visit, that she herself had not yet got all the shocks and surprises the Leitzels were capable of affording her. Her Southern sentiment of hospitality received another unexpected blow in discovering that Jennie and Sadie quite seriously objected to entertaining her brother-in-law at their home.

"We ain't used to comp'ny stopping here," Jennie explained to her. "Danny's business acquaintances always go to the hotel. It wouldn't suit me just so well. We ain't so young as we used to be, and it would certainly be a worry to me to have company stopping here. You'd best not begin that kind of thing, Margaret. If your brother-in-law slep' and eat here, it would mebby give our Sadie the headache."

That New Munich hospitality, instead of being a condition of daily life as with Southerners, was so specialized an occasion as to cause the upsetting of a household and the expenditure of the nervous energy of a whole family, Margaret had come to recognize. People did not "keep open house"; they "entertained." But how was she to spring such a thing upon Walter, who knew no other standard of hospitality than that of the open Southern home? How explain to him upon his arrival that her home and her husband's was not open to him, and that he must stop at a hotel?

She had not at all solved the problem when in a wholly unlooked-for way it was solved for her. Confined to bed one day with a violent headache, and quite helpless to protect her babies from Jennie's hygienic theories, the twins were kept by their aunt in a hot, airtight room such as Jennie considered their proper environment, with the result that they cried all day; and the next day had heavy colds—their first disorder of any kind since their birth. But when Margaret, herself recovered, insisted upon taking them, suffering from influenza as they were, out into the chill air of a cold day in January, Jennie's thwarted will, thwarted affection, and wild anxiety for these babies of Danny's whom she loved almost fiercely, broke all bounds, and she gave Margaret her ultimatum.

"Or either you keep those children in the house till they're well already, or either I and Sadie leave this house where we have to look on at such croolities, and go to keep house by ourselves! Yes, this very day we go!"

Margaret paused in the strenuous work of getting little Daniel's arms into his coat sleeves, preparatory to his outing, and gazed up at Jennie with such a light of joyful hope in her eyes that Jennie, had she not been too blindly furious to see it, would certainly have withdrawn this proffered happiness from her now heartily detested sister-in-law.

"If Danny wasn't in Philadelphia to-day, I'd 'phone to his office and have him make you keep them in!" she raged frantically. "They'll get pneumonia, so they will!"

"Daniel couldn't make me, Jennie. I act under the doctor's orders. Daniel's a lawyer, not a physician. I'm taking the babies out to save them from having pneumonia."

"Daniel couldn't make you, couldn't he? Well, I can! Yes, and I mean what I say! You take these babies out on a day like this when they're sick, and I and Sadie move out this very day!" she harshly reiterated, under the delusion that Margaret would never put her to the test: for not only was Jennie incapable of realizing Margaret's utter indifference to the economic advantage of their joint housekeeping, but it also seemed to her wholly incredible that her sister-in-law could subject her devoted and indulgent husband to the suffering he would certainly undergo if deprived of his sisters' constant ministrations to his comforts.

"And when Danny comes home from Philadelphia to-night and finds us gone and our half of the furniture being moved out, what do you think he'll say to you for driving us out?"

Margaret, realizing that she must conceal the heaven opened up by this unexpected ultimatum, quickly cast down her eyes, that her tormentor might not see her quivering eagerness.

"I'll goad her to moving out!" she desperately resolved. "Oh! if only I can make it impossible for her to back down from her threat."

She suddenly raised her eyes again and laughed sarcastically. "Oh, you can't scare me with your threats! You'll not go!"

"You'll see whether we won't! You just dare to take those sick children outside this house, and you won't find I and Sadie here when you come home!"

"That won't worry me. You'll be back soon enough. Catch you leaving your brother's house! Oh, no, my dear, you don't fool me for one minute. Why, where on earth would you go?"

"Maybe you don't know," put in Sadie triumphantly, "that Jennie and me own the nice empty house at the corner that the tenants moved............