Rufe was disappointed. So hers was the mothering game. Besides his position was uncomfortable, knees under the table, and his coffee was getting cold. So he let her go after all, in order to reach a standing posture, but by the time he was free of the chair and the table, Miss Claes had vanished without haste into the kitchen. Rufus now stood dangling inconveniently between his breakfast and her return. She came; he went to her. Her dark eyes were utterly calm, no traceable deepening of the color in her face. She halted, but lightly held in the two hands before her was a gold-edged dish, with a little golden globe of butter in the center. Rufus dropped back in his chair and lifted his coffee cup. What on earth could a man do with a woman holding a butter dish? “It’s hell to be fastidious,” he thought, in regard to his own inhibitions. Something delectable had gone out of the July day. Miss Claes was no nearer his understanding than before. Pidge would have the laugh on him, because these women could never keep anything to themselves. He didn’t mind anything about Pidge so much as her laugh. Altogether, this little brush at breakfast left him unsatisfied--and this was a play day. “Thanks,” he said at the door. She gave him a pink, an old-fashioned white one. “The butter-and-egg-man brought in some from his dooryard garden in Yonkers,” she said. Rufe started upstairs. There were voices from one of the rooms on the main floor, but the second was entirely empty and silent until a rear door opened and Fanny Gallup looked out. “Hello,” she said in a far-reaching whisper. Fanny’s “hello” was one of the best of her little ways. She said it, as one would cast a silken noose. Rufe looked back and down. On certain mornings he would have growled an answer and tramped on, but there was something white and calling about the face in the dim shadows this morning, and for a wonder the kids weren’t squalling. “Oh, come in. Come on in!” was in his ears. Her bare arm was raised and he saw the little muffler of dark in the pit of it. The lacing was gone from the smock, moreover, and there was a pull for the moment to Fanny’s sad little breast. The fact that the smock had once been Pidge’s, Rufe thrust back into his mind for future reference. He halted, looking around and listening again. Then he tiptoed in and the door was shut. Not a great while afterward the door was opened, the crying of children was heard. Fanny was moaning, “Don’t go ’way--oh, don’t go ’way!” But Rufus breasted past her muttering within himself, “Never again!” * * * * *