He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on of his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was looking at him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind and snow; but her eyes were steady. "I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before we--before--well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of schooling. I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if--" Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard. V When Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert said: "Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter that you received to-night?" "Fire away!" said his bride. "Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren--You were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'" "All right," said Nevada. "But let's forget it. The joke's on Barbara, anyway!" THIMBLE, THIMBLE These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting: You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Cañons of the Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities--to say nothing of Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank Stockton, as you will conclude. First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside. The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had slaves to burn. But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. (Of course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the "et" after "Carter.") Well, anyhow: