"Look, Jen!" Gladys giggled, as her eldest sister passed down the room. "This is the new thing at the Washington. Gus has got it so you wouldn’t know her from Samarine herself." Jennie went on to the kitchen, where, as she expected, her mother was getting the supper, and did her best to be nonchalant. "Hello, momma! What’s the good word? What makes everyone so gay?" Lizzie looked up, a cover in one hand and a spoon in the other. Her face was so radiant that Jennie was still more mystified. "Oh, Jennie darling, your father has the money! He can make the payment to-morrow, and everything will come right." So Jennie’s plans recoiled upon herself. She had meant to tell her mother here and now that for four days past she had been Bob Collingham’s wife, and had a hundred dollars in her top bureau drawer. Her mother was to tell her father, and her father Teddy and the girls. But now—well, what would be the use? By keeping her secret she might put off inevitable fate a little longer. "Who lent it?" Jennie asked, after she had chosen her line of action. "Nobody; that’s the wonderful part of it. It’s a hundred and fifty dollars Teddy has earned." "’Earned!’ How?" "Selling bonds for a man he knows. He doesn’t want anything said about it, because it’s what he calls ’on the side.’ If the house knew of it—that he was working in off times for some one else—he might lose his job. But, oh, Jennie, isn’t it wonderful?" Jennie thought it wonderful for other reasons than Teddy’s glory and the peace of the family mind. It was less easy to renounce Hubert than it had been an hour or two earlier. If he snapped his fingers she had said to herself, while crossing the ferry, she would run to him like a dog, in spite of everything; and if she did it, she would want to be free from the complications that must ensue if she were to proclaim herself Bob’s wife. Having assented to her mother’s praise of Teddy, she went back through the living room and on upstairs to take off her hat and coat. Near the top of the stairs, the door of the bathroom opened suddenly and Teddy appeared in his shirt sleeves. There being nothing unusual in that, she was about to say, "Hello, Ted!" and ascend the few remaining steps to her room. But seeing her moving upward in the dim hall light, Teddy started back within the bathroom, and, with a movement he couldn’t control, slammed the door noisily. The action was so odd that she called out to him: "It’s only me, goose! What’s the matter with you? Have you got the jumps?" The door opened and Teddy reappeared, grinning sheepishly. "I—I didn’t have my coat on," was the only explanation he could find. "Dear, dear!" Jennie threw over her shoulder, as she passed into her own room. "We’ve got terribly modest all of a sudden, haven’t we?" But weeks later she recalled this lame excuse. CHAPTER XV