Page:The Black Cat v01no07 (1896-04).pdf/48

46 my dear, is the end of the tale of woe. And quite time, too. It will make a hole in my salary to pay the postage.

I'll send you a postal when we are settled in some secluded spot where shoes and trousers are unknown—and the wearers of those articles.

Meantime, I am thinking more about myself than ever before in my life. Every morning when I unfold the paper I expect to see in enormous headlines:

,

or

Good-by, you dear, sweet, patient, long-suffering woman. Arthur little imagines how much I've contributed towards making you a model wife. Rh

V.

That part of Miss Forsythe's conversation overheard by Mr. Robert Fairfax.

To Mrs. Nannie Simms:—I always use a kitchen knife. Don't grin like a dog. Billy said it was inane, but I didn't care, for the result was just as good as his. You see we had no end of fun experimenting with all sorts of things. The ranch was twenty miles from the nearest town, and I 'got my hand in' at almost everything from cooking to carpentering. We even painted the house in the most artistic style, mixing our own colors. It was such fun, ladling up little dabs of paint from a circle of cans, and stirring up the mixture. We were trying to get a red like the cover of my prayer book. And we did it, too. We had only one kind of wall paper, and it required 'treatment.' It was a pretty bluish gray, with scraggly daisies on it. We painted one room in olive green, floors and woodwork, and that killed out all the blue, and gave us a gray and green apartment. And another room, painted in dark brown, brought out the blue and gave us a blue room.