“Oh, Kid,” sighed Molly, wiping the powder off his shoulder with her handkerchief, “I’d rather hear you say that than to own all of New York.  And we can be happy on so little!”

The Kid looked down at his speckless cuffs and shining patent leathers with a suspicion of melancholy.

“It’ll hurt hardest in the rags department,” said he.  “I’ve kind of always liked to rig out swell when I could.  You know how I hate cheap things, Moll.  This suit set me back sixty-five.  Anything in the wearing apparel line has got to be just so, or it’s to the misfit parlors for it, for mine.  If I work I won’t have so much coin to hand over to the little man with the big shears.”

“Never mind, Kid.  I’ll like you just as much in a blue jumper as I would in a red automobile.”

Before the Kid had grown large enough to knock out his father he had been compelled to learn the plumber’s art.  So now back to this honorable and useful profession he returned.  But it was as an assistant that he engaged himself; and it is the master plumber and not the assistant, who wears diamonds as large as hailstones and looks contemptuously upon the marble colonnades of Senator Clark’s mansion.

Eight months went by as smoothly and surely as though they had “elapsed” on a theater program.  The Kid worked away at his pipes and solder with no symptoms of backsliding.  The Stovepipe gang continued its piracy on the high avenues, cracked policemen’s heads, held up late travelers, invented new methods of peaceful plundering, copied Fifth avenue’s cut of clothes and neckwear fancies and comported itself according to its lawless bylaws.  But the Kid stood firm and faithful to his Molly, even though the polish was gone from his fingernails and it took him 15 minutes to tie his purple silk ascot so that the worn places would not show.

One evening he brought a mysterious bundle with him to Molly’s house.

“Open that, Moll!” he said in his large, quiet way.  “It’s for you.”

Molly’s eager fingers tore off the wrappings.  She shrieked aloud, and in rushed a sprinkling of little McKeevers, and Ma McKeever, dishwashy, but an undeniable relative of the late Mrs. Eve.

Again Molly shrieked, and something dark and long and sinuous flew and enveloped her neck like an anaconda.

“Russian sables,” said the Kid, pridefully, enjoying the sight of Molly’s round cheek against the clinging fur.  “The real thing.  They don’t grow anything in Russia too good for you, Moll.”

Molly plunged her hands into the muff, overturned a row of the family infants and flew to the mirror.  Hint for the beauty column.  To make bright eyes, rosy checks and a bewitching smile:  Recipe—­one set Russian sables.  Apply.

When they were alone Molly became aware of a small cake of the ice of common sense floating down the full tide of her happiness.

“You’re a bird, all right, Kid,” she admitted gratefully.  “I never had any furs on before in my life.  But ain’t Russian sables awful expensive?  Seems to me I’ve heard they were.”