During the morning Henry did not trouble himself about Sylvia and what she would think about it all. Towards noon, however, he began to dread going home and facing her. When he started he felt fairly cowardly. He stopped at the drug store and bought a pound of peppermints. Albion Bennet waited on him. Albion Bennet was an intensely black-haired man in his forties. His black hair was always sleek with a patent hair-oil which he carried in his stock. He always wore a red tie and an old-fashioned scarf-pin set with a tiny diamond, and his collars were made of celluloid. "I have gone back to the hotel to board," he informed Henry, while tying up the parcel. He colored a little under his black, bristling cheeks as he spoke. "I thought you left," said Henry. "So I did. I went to board at the Joneses', but--I can't stand a girl right in my face and eyes all the time. When I want to get married, and see the right one, then I want to do the courting; but hang it if I can stand being courted, and that's what I've been up against ever since I left the hotel, and that's a fact. Susy Jones was enough, but when it came to Fanny Elliot getting thick with her, and both of them on hand, it was too much. But I stuck it out till Susy began to do the cooking and her mother made me eat it." "I have heard Miss Hart wasn't a very good cook," said Henry. "Well, she ain't anything to brag of; but say, a man can stand regulation cooking done bad, but when it comes to new-fangled messes done bad, so a man don't know what he's eating, whether it's cats or poisonous mushrooms, I draw the line. Miss Hart's bread is more generally saleratusy and heavy, but at least you know it's heavy bread, and I got heavy stuff at the Joneses and didn't know what it was. And Miss Hart's pies are tough, but you know you've got tough pies, and at the Joneses' I had tough things that I couldn't give a name to. Miss Hart's doughnuts are greasy, but Lord, the greasy things at the Joneses' that Susy made! At least you know what you've got when you eat a greasy doughnut, and if it hurts you you know what to tell the doctor, but I had to give it up. I'd rather have bad cooking and know what it is than bad cooking and know what it isn't. Then there were other things. I like, when I get home from the store, to have a little quiet and read my paper, and Susy and Fanny, if I didn't stay in the parlor, were banging the piano and singing at me all the time to get me down-stairs. So I've gone back to the hotel, and I'm enough sight better off. Of course, when that matter of Miss Farrel came up I left. A man don't want to think he may get a little arsenic mixed in with the bad cooking, but now I'm convinced that's all right." "How do you know?" asked Henry, paying for the peppermints. "I never thought Miss Hart had anything to do with it myself, but of course she wasn't exactly acquitted, neither she nor the girl. You said yourself that she bought arsenic here."