whose eye was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz, come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.
In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill. He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The doctor had been there.
"He says," Hattie told her, "that he must have been ill for a long time without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don't understand it. And now he's too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance."
He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit races and Pop Geers.
And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in the rocking chair at her husband's side caring for him and for Gramp who had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome again as if there were something in the air.
IN the Town the new concert hall of which Cousin Eva Barr and May Biggs had written with such enthusiasm and detail raised its white Greek façade a score of yards from the main street. Erected to the twin worship of the muses of Music and the Theater it supplanted the dismal opera house of an early, less sophisticated period, and so left the late U. S. Grant architecture of that shabby, moth-eaten structure in an undivided dedication to the bastard sister of Music and the Theater, a shabby, common-
