"What's the matter with you now?" demanded Mrs. Denbigh, her harassed eyes blinking in the lamplight, and her hatchet-face more than commonly sharp. "I ain't feelin' good," said Sallie. "I'm tired; I'm sick; I don't want to wash no dishes." Mrs. Denbigh shot a glance through the double-doorway to the littered parlor; but the face of her unattentive husband was hidden behind the crinkling sheets of the _Daily Spy_, gripped by one great, grimy fist, while the stubby forefinger of the other hand spelled out the short syllables of the personal-column, facetiously headed "Our Card-Basket." His huge bulk bulged over all the edges of the uncomfortable patent armchair in which he was sitting: a picture of gorged contentment, there was as yet no help to be expected from him. It was Mary, experienced in such attacks, who made ready to defend the law. "You ain't sick," she declared. "I am, too!" sniffed Sallie. "I'm awful sick!" "Get out: you et more'n I did. You just want to make me do the work, an' I won't, 'cause it's your turn. So there!" Mary's homecoming had, as it happened, not been the signal for a renewal of hostilities between her mother and herself. The former had just then been too hard at work to have either energy or thought in that direction, and throughout the evening meal the girl had deemed it wise to maintain a reticence calculated to keep her in the domestic background. Now, however, she had impulsively come forward, and the step at once brought her to Mrs. Denbigh's attention. "After what you done this noon," she said to Mary, "you'd better keep your mouth shut. Go and wash them dishes!" But Mary knew that she had now gone too far to retreat. "It wasn't my fault the stew was spilled," she protested; "and anyhow, you did lick me onc't for that. Sallie just wants to shove her work off on me." "I don't," blubbered Sallie. "I'll do 'em some evenin' when it's your turn." "Yes," Mary sneered, "I know how you will." "I will--I will--I will so!" Sallie's voice rose to a shrill shriek, and then suddenly broke off in the middle of a note: there was a sound of elephantine stirring from the parlor, and the feared master of the house, moved at last from his lethargy, rolled into the double doorway and seemed nearly to block it. One of the young reporters of _The Spy_ had once remarked--not in print--that Owen Denbigh resembled nothing so much as the stern of an armored cruiser seen from a catboat. How much of the covering of his powerful frame was fat and how much muscle is matter for conjecture; his life in the iron mills had certainly given him a strength at least approaching the appearance, and had blackened his large hands, reddened his big face, and grayed his bristling hair and his fiercely flaring mustache. "Whad's ahl this devil's racket?" he shouted, in the voice he used in triumphing over the turmoil of the puddling-furnace.