This last victim of woman's tongue moved rapidly towards the front lawn seeking safety amidst aged women. On the way he passed a fellow sufferer. Serena's cutting remarks had, for Ike, turned an afternoon of pleasure and recreation into a time of humiliation. Here was music, food, agreeable company, all turned into dust by public reprimands. Yet the inextinguishable fire of hope burned in his breast. In the fullness of time, Serena might forget, allow him to enter the kitchen as one in good standing and, in the alluring company of the colored maids, to partake of refreshments. Until then he must wait. Doing this, he watched the assemblage with melancholy eyes. He considered the band futile. It played no jazz. In an unhappy hour, tobacco brings solace to man. Ike produced a cigarette. Lighting it, he puffed nervously, suspecting the use of the weed in this haunt of aged women to be taboo. Happy laughter arose in the kitchen easily identified as the hearty tones of Serena, amused, a favorable augury to the courtier cooling his heels in the ante room. Casting down his cigarette, Ike turned to reconnoiter. The butt dropped beneath the porch into some ancient leaves, damp but inflammable. The leaves ignited and smouldered. Fanned by a gentle breeze the fire grew into a burning which produced much smoke and little flame. Upon the porch sat Mrs. Comfort Bean. Life to her was an open book. She had survived three husbands. The first, a drunkard, had drowned, not in rum, but in the river into which he had the misfortune to fall while returning home from a convivial evening enjoyed with other gay lads at the village tavern. The second, a gambler, was shot in an altercation over the ill-timed presence of five aces in a card game. The third, a fragile thing, had faded like a flower. Mrs. Bean had neither regrets for, nor fear of, man. She knew him too well. She had come to anchor in the Lucinda Home like a storm ridden ship seeking safe harbor after a stormy passage. Here lay a peace the like of which she had never known. But one cloud rested upon her horizon. Mrs. Bean was afraid of fire. She considered that because the inmates could not dwell upon the ground floor of the Home, the place was a fire trap and the most horrible holocaust, not only possible but probable. To inure herself to the inevitable, she read the harrowing details of every fire involving fatalities. Having enjoyed refreshments, Mrs. Bean had retired to the porch that she might listen to the music in the peace of her own thoughts. She sniffed. It was but a tentative sniff. Not a full, deep whiff. Such sniffs she gave many times each day. "Somethin's burnin'," said Mrs. Comfort Bean. Hearers being absent, there was no sympathetic response. "I smell fire," she announced in louder tones. A phenomenon puzzled Mrs. Bean's highly developed olfactory nerves. Her nostrils were assailed by the odor of ignited hay instead of the fateful smell of burning wood.