"All right, Doctor," he said weakly, sliding a little farther down into the bed, "I'll do just as you say. Only I wish you'd ring and see if any mail has come for me." The boy who answered the doctor's call was an athletic young fellow. Van thought that between them they could manage the maniac; so he sprang out crying, "Quick! This man is crazy. Help me get him down!" To his surprise the boy seized him and deposited him back in bed. "What in thunder is the matter with you people?" shouted Van. "I'm not going to stay here with that man when there's nothing the matter with me!" "There, there," coaxed the boy, "you're all right, sir; try to go to sleep, can't you?" Then Van turned over to the wall and wept salt Freshman tears, and the awe-struck boy gently closed the door. And Cupid, with his wings folded over his little arms, sat upon the bureau and laughed long and cynically. It was now past twelve o'clock. Church was over, and Dolores was returning. Home-ward gently she rode with surging thoughts in her bosom, and an expression of sweet, religious calm hovering over her straight black brows. That was the Spanish of her. The moment the front door closed behind her she sprinted for the telephone. That was the American of her. Had Papa Payson not been absorbed in the forty-eight-page Christmas edition of the Los Angeles _Herald_, he might have overheard the following semi-conversation: "----" "Main eight-double-eight." "----" "Yes." "----" "Is this the Westminster?" "----" "Will you--er--that is--did the Stanford Glee Club leave this morning?" "----" "Oh! Will you tell me, please, whether Mr. Cecil Van Dyke left with them?" "----" "Oh, I'm so sorry! What's the matter?" "----" "Appendicitis!" The receiver dropped and swung against the wall. Dolores had fled to mamma. Perkins and Mason, treating each other at every station short of the prohibition town of Pomona, would have felt less complacent over their little joke had they seen the procession that left the Hotel Westminster at one-thirty P. M. on that balmy Christmas day. The order of march, as instituted by the American Dolores, was as follows: 1. The Payson carriage, with Mrs. and Miss Payson on the forward seat and a tenderly wrapped Freshman on the other, and the coachman instructed to drive gently. 2. Dr. Mead and the devoted bell-boy in a phaeton. 3. Small citizens on foot. The doctor, obeying to the letter the orders of Perkins, who had commanded him not to leave his patient for one moment, smiled broadly as he gathered the lunatic into his arms and bore him past the fatal poinsettia bushes and up the broad steps where the grave major-domo was waiting to receive them. The scale upon which the Payson household was conducted just suited the ideas of that worthy practitioner. * * * * * On Saturday, Perkins and Mason asked at the hotel for Van Dyke and the doctor.