He threw up his hands and laughed aloud, peals of unearthly laughter that woke the echoes of the empty house, that woke the canary in its cage by the window, causing it to utter a few protesting “cheeps,” that arrested the policeman on his beat outside, that did everything human laughter in the way of noise can do, even stimulating the blissful lady to open half a glazed eye for the fraction of a second. After his paroxysm had subsided, he looked at the woman for a moment, and then with an air of peculiar malevolence took a sheet of note-paper from a small writing-table beneath the canary’s cage and wrote on it:
“ Let me never see your face again.—E. Q.”
This, by the aid of a hairpin that had fallen into her lap, he pinned to her apron. Then, with another laugh, he left her beneath the g
