As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade; he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon municipal rights. And here one evening he sat, some few days after his son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by a retreat from one room to another. "Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to." It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration. None of them realized it--hardly she herself. She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead, and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere else. "Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?" "No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with the builder about it today." He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice was dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan. She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety. "No." "Well, then, is it the--Sisters?" "Not the Sisters. They were in last week." "Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the Benevolent Policemen?" "No, not the Policemen. They won't be around for a month yet." Her hand dropped to his shoulder and her eyes searched his. To another they might have seemed staring; to him they were only intent. "Poor pa; he's like a ten-pin standing at the end of the alley, isn't he? They all take a turn at him, don't they?" "I'm afraid that's about it, Jennie." He smiled rather wanly again and smoothed her hand with his own. "Well, what else is there?" pondered Jane. "Is it the Afro-American bishop raising the mortgage on their chapel?"