Cora gave her a long look in which a childlike pleading mingled
with a faint, strange trouble; then this glance wandered moodily
from the face of her sister to her own slippers, which she
elevated to meet her descending line of vision.

"And you know I can't help it," she said, shifting quickly to the
role of accuser. "So what's the use of behaving like the Pest?"
She let her feet drop to the floor again, and her voice trembled a
little as she went on: "Laura, you don't know what I had to endure
from him to-night. I really don't think I can stand it to live in
the same house any longer with that frightful little devil. He's
been throwing Ray Vilas's name at me until--oh, it was ghastly
to-night! And then--then----" Her tremulousness increased. "I
haven't said anything about it all day, but I _met_ him on the
street downtown, this morning----"

"You met Vilas?" Laura looked startled. "Did he speak to you?"

"`Speak to me!'" Cora's exclamation shook with a half-laugh of
hysteria. "He made an awful _scene_! He came out of the Richfield
Hotel barroom on Main Street just as I was going into the
jeweller's next door, and he stopped and bowed like a monkey,
square in front of me, and--and he took off his hat and set it on
the pavement at my feet and told me to kick it into the gutter!
Everybody stopped and stared; and I couldn't get by him. And he
said--he said I'd kicked his heart into the gutter and he didn't
want it to catch cold without a hat! And wouldn't I please be so
kind as to kick----" She choked with angry mortification. "It was
horrible! People were stopping and laughing, and a rowdy began to
make fun of Ray, and pushed him, and they got into a scuffle, and