Apparently the man stood for a time in the center of the room, hesitant. Then, to Nathan’s bewilderment, he sank down on the sofa. Nathan heard the springs creak plainly. Next came the scratch of a match, the silhouette the flare made of adjacent furniture on west wall and ceiling, and the acrid odor of cigar smoke. A queer burglar, this! He sat down on the family sofa and lit a smoke before proceeding to his loot. And Milly might come at any minute. Milly came. She let herself in the front way. Nathan knew when she had arrived by another draught of spring wind and the sharp click when the front door closed and the lock snapped. But she did not turn on the lights. Her footstep sounded on the hard-wood floor of the hall and he knew without looking around that she was standing in the door. The sofa springs creaked. Nathan waited for Milly to shriek when she beheld a burglar smoking in the room. He had his mind ready to reach for the chain of the reading lamp and snap it on. After that,—well, Nathan still knew how to use his fists. But Milly did not shriek. Instead, he heard her say in the most normal, natural intonation of voice, softened with a trace of humor: “Don’t take you long to make yourself comfortable, does it?” And a man’s coarser bass returned from that dark: “You bet it don’t! Leave it to your uncle!” “I hope to Gawd nobody spotted you gettin’ in. That ol’ Miss Pease next door puts her eyes on the doorstep when she sleeps, same as she puts out her cat.” “Naw, I waited until a cloud went over the moon before I left the shadow o’ the fence. But I did knock my shin over a chair in the kitchen. I’ll break that dam’ thing if you leave it in my way again—fell over it last Sunday night, very same way!” Nathan was too stunned to move. He seemed all at once to have no body, so completely had all physical sensation fled. He might have been a disembodied spirit sitting in that chair—which he was, so far as the man and his wife were concerned. And they thought him six hundred miles away! He waited. He knew Milly was pulling off her gloves and unpinning her hat. “You didn’t light any lights, did you?” It was Milly’s voice that asked it. “What th’ hell sort o’ boob do you take me for, Mil? Besides, whatter we need lights for—you an’ me?” The sofa springs suddenly creaked with Milly’s added weight. “Gawd, kiss me, honeybunch! Gimme a good old humdinger. There ain’t nobody can raise my hair with kissin’ like you can, Si, or anything else, for that matter. Seems just as if a gorilla had me—and I was perfectly willin’ the gorilla should!” They kissed. Later-day motion-picture censors would have shortened that kiss considerably, say about forty seconds. “Honestly, Si,” cried the girl, “when you kiss me like that, I just wanner die—or wish I could!” “Some little kisser I am, huh? Nat don’t kiss you like that, now, does he, what?”