The Horace Chadwicks were breakfasting in their stately old colonial home in the environs of the city. The shrill song of twittering robins came through the half-open windows on a gentle spring breeze and the morning sunlight flooded the room. A benign spirit of peace and domestic tranquility seemed to brood over the scene. Mr. Chadwick, a solid and substantial looking man of fifty-five, was supping his coffee and glancing through the financial columns of the Gazette. Mrs. Chadwick had finished her grape-fruit and had just picked up the Bulletin. She was a matronly person whose ample bosom seemed to be but the continuation of a rippling series of superfluous chins. She carried herself, even in her morning negligee, with that air of conscious rectitude and commanding importance which she felt to be fitting for a prominent banker’s wife who was a member of three important women’s clubs, secretary of the anti-cigarette section of the local branch of the W. C. T. U., vice-president of the Baltimore chapter of the League Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage and chairman of the Advisory Committee to the State Board of Moving Picture Censors.

If Mr. Chadwick hadn’t been deeply immersed in the Gazette’s account of the proposed merger of certain copper interests he might have noticed gathering storm clouds a few feet away, but he was blissfully unconscious of any impending catastrophe. Screened by his paper he had no inkling of the passing train of emotions that were registered upon the extensive facial areas of the partner of his joys. Amazement, incredulity, bewilderment, chagrin, unholy rage—all of these feelings were depicted upon the countenance of Mrs. Chadwick and were succeeded in turn, by an expression of scornful calm that was pregnant with possibilities of a most unpleasant nature. She laid down the Bulletin, removed her glasses and addressed her husband in a voice that was cold and menacing.

“What car do you propose using Sunday, Horace?” she asked.

“What’s that?”, said Mr. Chadwick looking around his newspaper. “What car? Sunday? Oh, I guess I’ll take the new touring car out?”

“Don’t you think the limousine would be better?”, she continued in an even voice. “More sheltered, more screened from the public gaze as it were?”

“More screened from the public gaze?”, he repeated. “What are you getting at, Elizabeth? No limousine for me if this weather keeps up. Wonderful morning, my dear, a wonderful morning. I’ll bet the crocuses sprouted three inches over night. A few more days like this and I’ll peel a half dozen years off. Nothing like spring to put life into you, my dear, nothing like it.”

“Nothing like spring to make foolish nincompoops out of a lot of old men,” corrected Mrs. Chadwick in a voice that was positively glacial.

Something in the tone of it stirred her husband’s curiosity. He put down his paper and looked up quickly.

“What are you talking about, Elizabeth?” he inquired sharply.

“I suppose Colonel Roundtree has picked a blonde,” went on Mrs. Chadwick icily, utterly ignoring his question. “Have you decided on a brunette, Horace?”

“Blondes—brunettes?” murmured Mr. Chadwick hazily. “Have I decided—say, Elizabeth, what’s got into you?”

“I dare say brunettes are a little too seriously inclined for you,” ran on his wife in the same even, ironic tone. “Blondes are livelier and they have the funniest names, I’m told. Which do you prefer, Horace—Trixie, Mazie or Delphine?”

Mr. Chadwick surveyed his wife with alarm.

“What’s the joke, Elizabeth?”, he inquired with an attempt at a smile that was really pathetic. “Where do I laugh?”

“Into her little pink ear, Horace,” responded Mrs. Chadwick.

“Look here, Elizabeth,” he shouted, “either you need a doctor or the air around here needs clearing. Humor was never your strong forte. There are a lot of sly little innuendos floating about that I’m going to choke off right here and now. Some damned old meddler in petticoats has been buzzing about this house and I’m going to find out who it is.”

Mrs. Chadwick composedly confronted him.

“A pretty well known meddler, Horace,” she remarked with irritating suavity. “A meddler known to thousands. I refer you to the Bulletin.”

She carelessly indicated the paper in front of her. Mr. Chadwick grabbed it and hurriedly glanced at the front page. A three column headline attracted his attention.

By the time Mr. Chadwick got that far he was spluttering like a leaky radiator valve. By the time he had finished reading through the flossy little yarn that Billy Crandall had woven out of Jimmy Martin’s story, he looked as if he had overstayed the time limit in the hot room at a Turkish bath by fifteen minutes. His face was fiery red and the veins stood out on his forehead in knotty little lumps.

The fragmentary remarks that Mrs. Chadwick was able to extract from the almost incoherent jumble of sounds that escaped from the lips of her spouse during the reading were of such a general nature and tone that she put her hands to her ears in sheer self-defense and sat wildly tapping her feet on the floor to drown them out. The next minute her husband crashed out of the room and through the hall to his waiting car.

“Cut her loose, Martin, and drive me to the Bulletin office,” he shouted to the trim chauffeur. “I’m going over the top after that crowd of pestiferous puppies.”

Though it was not quite nine o’clock when Horace Chadwick arrived at the Bulletin office he found eight other apoplectic prominent citizens gathered in excited colloquy in the ante-room to the office of Richard Chilvers, the owner and editor-in-chief of the paper. Col. Hannibal Roundtree, a handsome and stately old gentleman with a militant imperial and a flowing white moustache, was addressing remarks to a thoroughly scared young man who had thoughtlessly confessed a minute before that he was Mr. Chilver’s secretary.

“You listen to me, young man,” he was saying. “You march into that office there and get Dick Chilvers on that private wire of his and tell him that if he’s a gentleman he’ll drop his breakfast and come down heah and meet a delegation of irate and fightin’ mad citizens of this community face to face, instead skulkin’ in the trenches.”

The youthful secretary vanished through a swinging door marked “Private” and Colonel Roundtree turned to his friends.

“Damned, rascally, cowardly hounds—that’s what I call ’em. They print a dastardly canard like that and then they skedaddle in the face of the common enemy.”

“You’re talking, colonel,” broke in Mr. Chadwick. “I haven’t met anybody I know, but I’ll bet we’re the laughing stock of the whole town.&r............