A little before nine o'clock, the blind man came to kiss Barbara good-night. Then he went upstairs. Miriam came in and talked a few minutes of quilts, pickles, and lingerie, then she, too, went up to begin her usual restless night.
Left alone, Barbara discovered that she did not care to read. It was too late to begin work upon the new stock of linen, lawn, and batiste which had come the day before, and she lacked the impulse, in the face of such discouraging prospects as Aunt Miriam had encountered at the hotel. Barbara steadily refused to admit, even to herself, that she was discouraged, but she found no pleasure in the thought of her work.
A Light in the Window
She unfastened the front door, lighted a candle, and set it upon the sill of the front window. Within twenty minutes Roger had come, entering the house so quietly that Barbara did not hear his step and was frightened when she saw him.
"Don't scream," he said, as he closed the door leading into the hall. "I'm not a burglar—only a struggling young law student with no prospects and even less hope."
"I infer," said Barbara, "that the Bascom liver is out of repair."
"Correct. It seems absurd, doesn't it, to be affected by another man's liver while you are supremely unconscious of your own?"
"There are more things in other people's digestions than our philosophy can account for," she replied, with a wicked perversion of classic phrase. "What was the primary cause of the explosion?"
"It was all his own fault," explained Roger. "I like dogs almost as well as I do people, but it doesn't follow that dogs should mix so constantly with people as they usually are allowed to. I was never in favour of Judge Bascom's bull pup keeping regular office hours with us, but he has, ever since the day he waddled in behind the Judge with a small chain as the connecting link. I got so accustomed to his howling in the corner of the office where he was chained up that I couldn't do my work properly when he was asleep. So all went well until the Judge decided to remove the chain and give the pup more room to develop himself in.
"Pethood"