Big Poker Site hazard of new fortunes 71

Bound to see it on Miss Christines hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs, first!" He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painters words about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring. "Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her mothers habitual address, "and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, thats right. You know youd be roaming all over the pasture if she didnt." The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him. on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two young men had been devoted to them. "Oh, I think hes just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others had left them after the departure of their guests. "Who?" asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a softened fire. She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it. "Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of yours!" "He is proud," assented Christine, with a throb of exultation. Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone. "One way is enough for me," he explained. "When I walk up, I dont walk down. Bye-bye, my son!" He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. "That fellow puzzles me. I dont know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?" he asked of March. "Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes." "And how is it with you, Mrs. March?" "Oh, I want to flatter him up." "No; really? Why? Hold on! Ive got the change." Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down-town. "Three!" he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, "Why?" "Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, dont you?" Mrs. March answered, with a laugh. "Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?" "Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson." "I guess youre partly right," said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed. "An ideal busted?" March suggested. "No, not that, exactly," said Fulkerson. "But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasnt conceited all the time." "Oh!" Mrs. March exulted, "nobody could be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst modesty, when hed be quite flattery-proof." "Yes, thats what I mean. I guess thats what makes me want to kick him. Hes left compliments on my hands that no decent man would." "Oh! thats tragical," said March. "Mr. Fulkerson," Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice, "who is Mrs. Mandel?" "Who? What do you think of her?" he rejoined. "Ill tell you about her when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Aint it beautiful?" They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight. "The most beautiful thing in New York--the one always and certainly beautiful thing here," said March; and his wife sighed, "Yes, yes." She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near, and then pulled him back in a panic. "Well, there aint really much to tell

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