MRS. ROBERTS, in an ecstasy of satisfaction: ‘Willis! Oh, you’ve come in time to see him just as he is. Look at him, Willis!’ In the excess of her emotion she twitches her husband about, and with his arm fast in her clutch, presents him in the disadvantageous effect of having just been taken into custody. Under these circumstances Roberts’s attempt at an expression of diffident heroism fails; he looks sneaking, he looks guilty, and his eyes fall under the astonished regard of his brother-in-law. WILLIS: ‘What’s the matter with him? What’s he been doing?’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘’Sh, Edward! What’s he been doing? What does he look as if he had been doing?’ MRS. CRASHAW: ‘Agnes—’ WILLIS: ‘He looks as if he had been signing the pledge. And he—smells like it.’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘For shame, Willis! I should think you’d sink through the floor. Edward, not a word! I _am_ ashamed of him, if he _is_ my brother.’ WILLIS: ‘Why, what in the world’s up, Agnes?’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘Up? He’s been _robbed_!—robbed on the Common, not five minutes ago! A whole gang of garotters surrounded him under the Old Elm—or just where it used to be—and took his watch away! And he ran after them, and knocked the largest of the gang down, and took it back again. He wasn’t hurt, but we’re afraid he’s been injured internally; he may be bleeding internally _now_—Oh, do you think he is, Willis? Don’t you think we ought to send for a physician?—That, and the cologne I gave him to drink. It’s the brandy I poured on his head makes him smell so. And he all so exhausted he couldn’t speak, and I didn’t know what I was doing, either; but he’s promised—oh yes, he’s promised!—never, never to do it again.’ She again flings her arms about her husband, and then turns proudly to her brother. WILLIS: ‘Do you know what it means, Aunt Mary?’ MRS. CRASHAW: ‘Not in the least! But I’ve no doubt that Edward can explain, after he’s changed his linen—’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘Oh yes, do go, Edward! Not but what I should be proud and happy to have you appear just as you are before the whole world, if it was only to put Willis down with his jokes about your absent-mindedness, and his boasts about those California desperadoes of his.’ ROBERTS: ‘Come, come, Agnes! I _must_ protest against your—’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘Oh, I know it doesn’t become me to praise your courage, darling! But I should like to know what Willis would have done, with all his California experience, if a garotter had taken his watch?’ WILLIS: ‘I should have let him keep it, and pay five dollars a quarter himself for getting it cleaned and spoiled. Anybody but a literary man would. How many of them were there, Roberts?’ ROBERTS: ‘I only saw one.’ MRS. ROBERTS: ‘But of course there were more. How could he tell, in the dark and excitement? And the one he did see was a perfect giant; so you can imagine what the rest must have been like.’ WILLIS: ‘Did you really knock him down?’