Bread and Butter

ht have found much food for thought in this last rather absently spoken remark of Helen's. But certainly he had no leisure for it now. She and Tom were married--safe in the harbor of Happily Ever After. It was his own frail bark that, with the harbor lights fairly sighted,--for he and Ethel were to have been married in April,--had run upon the siren's reef.

It mattered very little how Helen came by her knowledge. The important fact was that she knew. She had told the story almost as well as he could have told it himself.

It had somehow, to be sure, lacked the punch that he would have put into it. That first hand-clasp, for instance. She had told of it as if such things had been everyday occurrences. To Jerry this unsought caress had been an emotional thunder-bolt launched at him out of a tranquil sky. He remembered having assured himself, half incredulously, after he'd got back to his room in the hotel that night, that the thing had actually happened--not in a book or a magazine, but really and