dogs or love-letters or hot-water bottles or funny old songs, it was
reasonably evident that something unique was practically guaranteed to
happen every single, individual night of the six weeks' subscription
contract. Like a youngster's joyous dream of chronic Christmas Eves,
this realization alone was enough to put an absurdly delicious thrill
of expectancy into any invalid's otherwise prosy thoughts.

Yet the next bit of attention from the Serial-Letter Co. did not
please Stanton one half as much as it embarrassed him.

Wandering socially into the room from his own apartments below, a
young lawyer friend of Stanton's had only just seated himself on the
foot of Stanton's bed when an expressman also arrived with two large
pasteboard hat-boxes which he straightway dumped on the bed between
the two men with the laconic message that he would call for them again
in the morning.

"Heaven preserve me!" gasped Stanton. "What is this?"

Fearsomely out of the smaller of the two boxes he lifted with much
rustling snarl of tissue paper a woman's brown fur-hat,--very soft,
very fluffy, inordinately jaunty with a blush-pink rose nestling deep
in the fur. Out of the other box, twice as large, twice as rustly,
flaunted a green velvet cavalier's hat, with a green ostrich feather
as long as a man's arm drooping languidly off the brim.

"Holy Cat!" said Stanton.

Pinned to the green hat's crown was a tiny note. The handwriting at
least was pleasantly familiar by this time.