“She raised her eyes to his, then struck him across the face with her ungloved hand.
“struck him across the face.”
“‘You damned fool!’ she whispered.
“He seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the orange trees. ‘Do you know why?’ he said, speaking slowly and distinctly; ‘because I feared that with him dead you would want me to marry you, and that, talked about as we have been, I might find it awkward to avoid doing so; because I feared that without him to stand between us you might prove an annoyance to me—perhaps come between me and the woman I love, the woman I am going back to. Now do you understand?’
“‘Yes,’ whispered the woman, and he left her.
“But there are only two people,” concluded Jephson, “who do not regard his saving of the husband’s life as a highly noble and unselfish action, and they are the man himself and the woman.”
We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral, when discovered. Meanwhile, MacShaugnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don’t have anything to do with inventions.
Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral. We agreed to hear the particulars, and judge for ourselves.
“This story,” commenced MacShaugnassy, “comes from Furtwangen, a small town in the Black Forest. There lived there a very wonderful old fellow named Nicholaus Geibel. His business was the making of mechanical toys, at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation. He made rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flop their ears, smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats, and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that would raise their hats and say, ‘Good morning; how do you do,’ and some that would even sing a song.