Mr. Peters reflected.  What next!  The old expedients had failed.  The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined chateau—­that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron legs.  His honor was at stake.  He had engaged to storm the castle single-handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them wassail and solace.  And all that stood between him and the coveted dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could—­aha!—­why not again?  Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around his little finger.  Why not again?  Not for years had he tried it.  Grim poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that.  But Ragsy and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!

Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife.  Her formless bulk overflowed the chair.  She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance.  Her eyes showed that she had been recently weeping.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Peters to himself, “if there’d be anything in it.”

The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards.  Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring.  But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon.  She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

“I’ll try it,” said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.

“Clara, darling,” he said in tones that shouldn’t have fooled a baby seal, “why should we have hard words?  Ain’t you my own tootsum wootsum?”

A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid.  Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of two of Love’s holiest of appellations.

But the miracle of spring was wrought.  Into the back room over the back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger.  It was ridiculous, and yet—­ Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it.

Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him.  Mr. Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were bound to his sides.

“Do you love me, James?” asked Mrs. Peters.

“Madly,” said James, “but—­”

“You are ill!” exclaimed Mrs. Peters.  “Why are you so pale and tired looking?”

“I feel weak,” said Mr. Peters.  “I—­”

“Oh, wait; I know what it is.  Wait, James.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.

“All right,” he confided to the ceiling.  “I’ve got her going.  I hadn’t any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib.  Well, sir; ain’t I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side?  What?  It’s a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar.  I wonder what she went out for.  I guess she’s gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we’re reconciled.  I’ll remember this.  Soft soap!  And Ragsy was talking about slugging her!”