"You admit then, Mrs. Walker, that you have broken the rule against having pets in the room?" the president asked with gravity. "It is a necessary rule. Fancy what would be the condition of the place if a lady in No. 117 had a tame sparrow, a gentleman in No. 120 a monkey, his neighbor a spaniel, the lady across the way a cat, and so on! I appreciate--we all do, and Mr. McCaleb more than all of us--how tender and charitable a nature yours is, but"--she looked at the recording secretary to gain courage--"but we simply must enforce the rules. I know so good a housekeeper as you must have been will understand this, and agree with me when I say that such a disciplinarian as Captain Walker no doubt was--unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of his acquaintance--would have been the first to counsel you to obey the rules. Won't you think it over from our point of view, Mrs. Walker, when you go back to your room? Do! Good afternoon." It was a very dejected Sarah Lucinda Walker that returned to her room. Her depression was noted and audibly commented upon by Mrs. Pearson, her next-door neighbor and arch-enemy. In fact, the whole corridor was alive with the news of her defeat. At the lunch-table it was the sole topic of conversation, and in the library old Colonel Rockwell--in the pauses of a quavering rendition of "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep"--bet Mr. Patterson three of the cigars his nephew always sent him on Fridays that Mrs. Walker, being a woman of spirit, would not yield even though the ultimatum were expulsion. Mrs. Walker heard of the wager, of course, that afternoon. They were a hundred or more antiquated and unseaworthy vessels, all anchored in a semi-genteel haven; and from morning till night, till sun should cease for them to shine and water to flow they had nothing to do but to listen to the whispering tide that told of the great ocean of life beyond, or to gossip among themselves of their own voyages dead and done. The incorrigible Mrs. Walker's spotless little room, with its bag of dried crusts on the window-sill, saved for her pet, became the storm center that afternoon. Every old lady who could possibly claim acquaintance called to inquire her intentions; every old gentleman leaned hard upon his cane as he lifted his hat to her in the halls with the deference due a gallant rebel. They loved a rebel, these old children, at the end of their lives fallen again into the domain of "you must" and "you must not." Sarah Lucinda Walker's world rocked beneath her. She intended, she believed, to obey the rules, to cast off the one creature on earth to which she could still play Lady Bountiful; to shut her hospitable window and her loving old heart on all these fluttering, visiting strangers who had heard of her generosity, and with every hour carried the news of it further.