In a week they were surreptitiously holding hands. In two weeks
they could scarcely endure the partings when Bud must start back
to San Jose, and were taxing their ingenuity to invent new
reasons why Marie must go along. In three weeks they were
married, and Marie's mother--a shrewd, shrewish widow--was
trying to decide whether she should wash her hands of Marie, or
whether it might be well to accept the situation and hope that
Bud would prove himself a rising young man.

But that was a year in the past. Bud had cabin fever now and
did not know what ailed him, though cause might have been summed
up in two meaty phrases: too much idleness, and too much mother-
in-law. Also, not enough comfort and not enough love.

In the kitchen of the little green cottage on North Sixth
Street where Bud had built the home nest with much nearly-Mission
furniture and a piano, Bud was frying his own hotcakes for his
ten o'clock breakfast, and was scowling over the task. He did not
mind the hour so much, but he did mortally hate to cook his own
breakfast--or any other meal, for that matter. In the next
room a rocking chair was rocking with a rhythmic squeak, and a
baby was squalling with that sustained volume of sound which
never fails to fill the adult listener with amazement. It
affected Bud unpleasantly, just as the incessant bawling of a
band of weaning calves used to do. He could not bear the thought
of young things going hungry.

"For the love of Mike, Marie! Why don't you feed that kid, or
do something to shut him up?" he exploded suddenly, dribbling
pancake batter over the untidy range.