her wrist lightly and reassuringly.

"You're all awfully good," said Emma McChesney, her eyes glowing with
something other than fever. "I've something to say. It's just this. If
I'm going to be sick I'd prefer to be sick right here, unless it's
something catching. No hospital. Don't ask me why. I don't know. We
people on the road are all alike. Wire T. A. Buck, Junior, of the
Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. You'll find plenty of clean
nightgowns in the left-hand tray of my trunk, covered with white
tissue paper. Get a nurse that doesn't sniffle, or talk about the
palace she nursed in last, where they treated her like a queen and
waited on her hand and foot. For goodness' sake, put my switch where
nothing will happen to it, and if I die and they run my picture in the
_Dry Goods Review_ under the caption, 'Veteran Traveling Saleswoman
Succumbs at Glen Rock,' I'll haunt the editor." She paused a moment.

"Everything will be all right," said the housekeeper, soothingly.
"You'll think you're right at home, it'll be so comfortable. Was there
anything else, now?"

"Yes," said Emma McChesney. "The most important of all. My son, Jock
McChesney, is fishing up in the Canadian woods. A telegram may not
reach him for three weeks. They're shifting about from camp to camp.
Try to get him, but don't scare him too much. You'll find the address
under J. in my address book in my handbag. Poor kid. Perhaps it's just
as well he doesn't know."

Perhaps it was. At any rate it was true that had the tribe of
McChesney been as the leaves of the trees, and had it held a family
reunion in Emma McChesney's little hotel bedroom, it would have