The remains of Sunday dinner, canned beans, buns, and weenies, were in the sink in the corner, and steaming on the gas plate was a teakettle for dishwater. The kettle was a rusty, misshapen affair, wearing another larger kettle’s lid which slid down over the snout, giving a startling resemblance to Mr. Taylor.

“What the hell, Willard, you going to hang around here all day?” Mr. Taylor restlessly demanded.

Florrie’s lip began to tremble.

“I want to learn the song!” she began to sob, so Papa hastily resumed the lesson, for Florrie was his pet.

Mr. Taylor picked up his coffee cup with the spoon in it and rattled the spoon around, scraping the last bit of sugar from the cracks, and watching the children meditatively as if, Marcia bitterly whispered to Lena, he was planning to eat them if no other plan for their disposition presented itself.

“Make yourself at home for a spell, Charlie,” urged Papa. “I got to quiet the kids for a while.”

Mr. Taylor put down his coffee cup on the floor and rattled his keys. If he couldn’t rattle or scrape something he tapped on whatever was handy, or snorted, coughed, whistled, anything to cheer himself up and make his presence felt. Now he got up and helped himself to the one piece of candied fruit Lena and Marcia had been quarreling over. He glanced down at Marcia’s composition book.

“Copying something?” he asked.

Marcia gave him an icy look.

“I don’t copy,” she said. “I make up.”

Whistling jauntily at the rebuff, Mr. Taylor made a leisurely tour of the rooms now, peering in the wardrobe, tapping the pipe, and looking through the kitchen curtains at the high black wood fence barely two feet away. A trickle of noonday sun lit up this pleasant prospect, accenting tenderly a tin ash pail now being investigated by Mrs. Jane’s cat, Tommy.

“What do you pay for this hole?” Mr. Taylor inquired, wrinkling his nose.

Papa put the guitar back in its case and the girls cast reproachful eyes at the intruder.

“Seven-fifty a week,” said Papa. “It’s an outrage, but then the old lady keeps an eye on the kids. Why, we had one of the prettiest little homes in London Junction for only ten dollars a month, when my wife was alive. The best furnishings. Fact was I had a brand new dining room set ordered the very day Daisy died. She always wanted the best. Wait a minute. I got a picture of an actress here, looks just like her. Found it in last week’s Leader.”

He produced from his vest pocket a newspaper clipping and the children ran to look over Mr. Taylor’s arms. It did look a little like Mama. The name here was Mabel Taliaferro, but Papa had clippings of other actresses who reminded him of Mama, either in the bangs or the tilt of the head, or a little expression around the eyes. The children fell in with this habit, saving pictures of every beauty in the news, disappointed if Papa silently shook his head after a study of them, justifying their mistake by pointing out that the watch or the ribbon or the earring was like Mama’s. Mr. Taylor scrutinized or rather sniffed the clipping indifferently, then handed it back to Papa.