“The next day she breezes in again and tries to get them to knock off an hour early so she can take them to the country club for tea, but they refuse this, so she makes little putty statues of them both and drove a few nails where they would do no good and upset a bucket of paste and leaned a two-hundred-dollar lace thing against a varnished wall to the detriment of both, and fell off a stepladder.  Old Angus caught her and boxed her ears soundly.  And again she drove them through the avenues of a colony of fine old families with money a little bit older, by a few days, and up the drive to their own door.

“Ellabelle was peeking between the plush curtains on this occasion, for some heartless busybody during the day had told her that her son and husband was both renegades now.  And strangely enough, she begun to get back her strength from that very moment—­seeing that exclusive and well-known young debby-tant consorting in public with the reprobates.  I’m darned if she didn’t have the genius after that to treat the whole thing as a practical joke, especially when she finds out that none of them exclusives had had it long enough to look down on another millionaire merely for pinching a penny now and then.  Old Angus as a matter of fact had become just a little more important than she had ever been and could have snubbed any one he wanted to.  The only single one in the whole place that throwed him down was his own English valet.  He was found helpless drunk in a greenhouse the third day, having ruined nine thousand dollars’ worth of orchids he’d gone to sleep amongst, and he resigned his position with bitter dignity the moment he recovered consciousness.

“Moreover, young Angus and this girl clenched without further opposition.  Her train-robber father said the boy must have something in him even if he didn’t look it, and old Angus said he still believed the girl to be nothing but a yellow-haired soubrette; but what should we expect of a woman, after all?

“The night the job was finished we had the jolliest dinner of my visit, with a whole gang of exclusive-setters at the groaning board, including this girl and her folks, and champagne, of which Angus, peer, consumed near one of the cut-glass vases full.

“I caught him with young Angus in the deserted library later, while the rest was one-stepping in the Henry Quatter ballroom or dance hall.  The old man had his arms pretty well upon the boy’s shoulders.  Yes, sir, he was almost actually hugging him.  The boy fled to this gilded cafe where the rest was, and old Angus, with his eyes shining very queer, he grabs me by the arm and says, ’Once when he was very small—­though unusually large for his age of three, mind you—­he had a way of scratching my face something painful with his little nails, and all in laughing play, you know.  I tried to warn him, but he couldn’t understand, of course; so, not knowing how else to instruct him, I scratched back one day, laughing myself