"Home," to Burke, had always meant a place of peace and rest, of luxurious ease and noiseless servants, of orderly rooms and well-served meals, of mellow lights and softly blended colors. Unconsciously now home still meant the same, with the addition of Helen--Helen, the center of it all. It was this dear vision, therefore, that he treasured all through his honeymoon trip, that he hugged to himself all that wretched first day of work, and that was still his star of hope as he hurried that night toward the Dale Street flat. If he had stopped to think, he would have realized at once that this new home of a day was not the old home of years. But he did not stop to think of anything except that for the first time in his life he was going home from work to Helen, his wife. Burke Denby never forgot the shock of that first home-going. He opened the door of his apartment--and confronted chaos: a surly janitor struggling with a curtain pole, a confusion of trunks, chairs, a stepladder, and a floor-pail, a disorder of dishes on a coverless table, a smell of burned milk, and a cross, tired, untidy wife who flung herself into his arms with a storm of sobs. "Home," after that, meant quite something new to Burke Denby. It meant Helen, of course, but-- Still it would be only for a little while, after all, he consoled himself each day. Just as soon as he got ahead a little, it would be different. He could sell the stuff, then; and the very first thing to go would be that hideous purple pillow on the red plush sofa--for that matter, the sofa would follow after mighty quick. And the chairs, too. They were a little worse to sit on than to look at--which was unnecessary. As for the rugs--when it came to those, it would be his turn to select next time. At all events, he would not be obliged to have one that, the minute you opened the door, bounced into your face and screamed "Hullo! I'm here. See me!" How he hated that rug! And the pictures and those cheap gilt vases--everything, of course, would be different in the new home. Nor did Burke stop to think that this constant shifting, in one's mind, of things that are, to things that may some time be, scarcely makes for content. Still, Burke could not have forgotten his house-furnishings, even if he had tried to do so, for he had to make payments on them "every few minutes," as he termed it. Indeed, one of the unsolved riddles of his life these days was as to why there were so many more Mondays (the day he paid his installments) than there were Saturdays (the day the Works paid him) in a week. For that matter, after all was said and done, perhaps to nothing was Burke Denby giving more thought these days than to money. Burke's experience with money heretofore had been to draw a check for what he wanted. True, he sometimes overdrew his account a trifle; but there was always his allowance coming the first of the month; and neither he nor the bank worried.