Sigma hurriedly offered her the cruet. “Idiot. I am asking you about the children. The—chil—dren. Where—are—they? Don’t you know? Little boys. Trenn, and Harry, and Jack Galbraith—where gone?” “Oh, Yack! He—” Sigma, with great action of hip and elbow, splurged over to the window, and motioned away across an empty lot. “What, _again_? Here,” Mrs. Mar wheeled upon her husband, “you must hold the baby a moment. If I lay her down she’ll wake up and scream.” As Mrs. Mar hastened out through the kitchen you could hear that she paused an instant to exclaim aghast at something she found there. Mr. Mar had accepted the charge with a curious tranquillity, making the infant comfortable in the hollow of his left arm. Then he went on with his writing. Sigma returned to the intricate task of setting the table. She did it all with an excited gravity, as if she were engaged in some spirited game, putting down plates, knives, and forks with an air of one playing trumps, and yet not quite sure if it was the right moment for them. When she had placed the straw mats with mathematical precision, she drew off proudly, to get the full splendor of effect. When it came to dealing with the sugar bowl, she glanced at Mar’s bent head, and helped herself to a lump, became furiously industrious upon the strength of that solatium, and plunged after spoons and cups. Whenever she made a clatter she stopped sucking and glanced nervously toward Mar, as if she expected him to rise and overwhelm her. He, with unlifted head, wrote steadily on. The child slept. Sigma put a worn horsehair chair at head and foot of the table, two high chairs on one side for the little boys, and an ordinary one on the other; as she did this last her eye fell on the four cups. She paused uncertain, till she had noiselessly counted five on her stumpy fingers. Then, “Oh, Yack maa ha’ en!” she reminded herself, lurched away into the kitchen and reappeared wiping a cup on a dish towel, one end of which she had tucked in her apron string. As she was about to deposit the fifth cup, she glanced at the man bent over the desk, and put her disengaged hand again in the sugar bowl. Mar turned suddenly in his creaking chair; Sigma started, and meaning to drop the sugar, dropped the cup instead. She stared an instant, open-mouthed, as at some unaccountable miracle; and then, with a howl, flung up her bare arms and fled round the table on her way to the kitchen, caught her great foot in the carpet-trap and measured her length on the floor. “Look here, you must go into the kitchen to do that.” Mar spoke as one not presuming to deny that it might be a part of her duty to precipitate herself on her stomach and howl, but questioning only the propriety of the spot selected. “I can’t have you doing it here,” he said.