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  “Why can’t she join forces with you if you are so alone in the world?”

“Because there’s a son.”

“Is he too young, or too old, to join forces?”

“No, he’s just right, and he’d be only too glad to join forces, or anything else that had me in it, but he must n’t, and that’s the reason Laura made me come here!” And with this she punched the sofa-pillows rebelliously, looking more like an enraged Angora kitten than anything else.

“It’s your hour for cold spray,” said Jimmy, the page-boy, peeping in at the crack of the door.

“I’ll come!” she responded unwillingly. “Now do steal in again,” she whispered, turning to me, “for I must talk to somebody, and if Laura could see you I know she would think you safer than anybody here.”

That afternoon, as I swung in my hammock in the grove below the sanitarium, I looked up at its three stories of height and its rows upon rows of windows, and wondered