The Arizona Sentinel

"Are you going to give me that $2.50?"

Arthur Ainsleigh turned quickly but quietly from the landscape on which his eyes were fixed—a bit of green meadow fringed with hills, on whose tops the rays of the setting sun were just resting, bringing out the bright tints of the heather, and giving to the whole scene a rich, warm coloring such as one sees in the works of the old masters that form the galleries of Europe—and looked tenderly but firmly at the beautiful girl who stood by his side.

"No, my darling," he said, taking her small hand gently into his, "I cannot stake you so high as that. Let it be a dollar, sweetheart, and the money is yours."

The girl started back as if stung by a serpent, the sudden movement revealing each graceful outline of her lithe figure and showing the perfect symmetry of her ashes-of-roses polonaise, which had two rows of pleating down the front and was shirred up the back-stretch and pretty well around the lower turn.

Looking at the young man steadily for a moment, she said in low, tremulous tones that showed far more plainly than the ghastly paleness of her face the terrible emotions that were racking her soul. "You are a mean, hateful thing," she said, bursting suddenly into a fit of wild, hysterical weeping, she left the room.

They had been married but four months, Arthur Ainsleigh and Ethel Quirk, and already the black clouds of domestic discord were showing their forbidding outlines on the edge of the erstwhile rosy horizon, while the jagged bits of jealousy were lighting up with a lurid glare the empyrean so recently unflecked by a cloud, and the hoarse mutterings of discontent and waning love reverberated in hollow and mournful tones throughout the dome of the ideal palace which these two young hearts had so short a time since built for themselves.

It was a simple matter that had brought about this discord. Ethel wanted five pairs of stockings at 50 cents per pair while Arthur had decided that two was all she needed.

For nearly an hour not a sound broke the silence that reigned in the boudoir from which Ethel had departed in anger, save the soft ticking of a marble clock. Arthur still sat moodily on the fauteuil, absorbed in thought. The door was softly opened and Ethel came in. Arthur did not hear her. Stepping softly across the room she knelt beside him, and, throwing her soft, warm arms around his neck, said in a voice broken with emotion: "I will take the dollar, darling."

Arthur looked up suddenly and saw that Ethel's eyes were suffused with tears. Kissing them gently away, and spitting the salt water out of his mouth while her head was again resting trustfully on his shirt-front, he said: "I knew you would see I was right," and handed her the dollar.

This happened on the 14th of December. On the 15th Arthur spent $16.40 to pay a bill for billiards and drinks that he had "sawed-off" for.