"I say, that hits me hard," said the duke, with a wry face. "Still, I join in saying God bless you."
"We're trying to end the feud, you see," said Penelope.
Tears came into his lordship's pale eyes. He looked first at one and then at the other, and then silently extended his hand to Randolph Shaw. He wrung it vigorously for a long time before speaking. Then, as if throwing a weight off his mind, he remarked:
"I say, Shaw, I'm sorry about that dog. I've got an English bull-terrier down there that's taken a ribbon or so. If you don't mind, I'll send him up to you. He—he knows Penelope."
THE CASE OF MRS. MAGNUS
BY BURTON E. STEVENSON
CHAPTER I
The position of confidential family adviser is not without its drawbacks, and it was with a certain reluctance that I told the office boy to show Mrs. Magnus in. For Mrs. Magnus was that bête noire of the lawyer—a woman recently widowed, utterly without business experience, and yet with a firm belief in her ability to manage her husband's estate. If Mrs. Magnus chose to ruin herself there was, of course, no reason why I should worry, but it is annoying to have a person constantly asking for advice and as constantly disregarding it. I never really understood why Mrs. Magnus asked for advice at all.
She was a woman of about fifty, thin and nervous, with a curious habit of compressing her lips into a tight knot, under the impression, I suppose, that the result indicated strength of character. Peter Magnus had married her when he was only an obscure clerk in the great commission house which he was afterward to own, and she was a school teacher or governess, or something of that sort. Perhaps she was a little ahead of him intellectually at the start, but he had broadened and developed, while she had narrowed and dried up, but she never lost the illusion of her mental supremacy, nor the idea that she had, in some dim way, married beneath her.
There were no children, and for the past ten years the old Magnus house on Twenty-third Street had been for her a kind of hermitage from which she seldom issued. Great business blocks sprang up on either side of it, but she would never permit her husband to sell it and move farther uptown.