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220 Mr. Harvey got up and walked out into the hall without a word. He reappeared a moment later, hat on, overcoat buttoned to his chin.

"You make me tired, the whole lot of you!" he blurted out. He stopped at the doctor's on his way home.

Idle hands were Mrs. Harvey's all November, with no surprises to prepare for the children at the Thanksgiving reunion, no muslin curtains to be freshly laundered for the guest-rooms, no new cretonne hangings to be added here and there, no especially mixed mince-meat to be stewed and stirred, and tenderly administered to for hours and hours on the back of the kitchen range. Idle hands, too, that later busied themselves nimbly with no bit of fancy ribbon or embroidery; that jotted joyfully down no list of children's names followed by an array of gifts; idle hands, and idle thoughts that did not plan during the long night hours how a hundred dollars could be evenly distributed, and lovingly, between the children and their children at Christmas-time. For when Mrs. Harvey came back from Aunt Julia's, the week after Thanksgiving, she took out all her best nightgowns from her best-clothes trunk, brought them down-stairs, laid them near at hand in her bottom bureau-drawer, and prepared for an illness. She could devise no other scheme for