



Produced by Al Haines








  HER HUSBAND'S PURSE

  BY
  HELEN R. MARTIN



  ILLUSTRATED BY
  JOHN NEWTON HOWITT



  GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
  1916




  _Copyright, 1916, by_
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

  _All rights reserved, including that of
  translation into foreign languages,
  including the Scandinavian_



  COPYRIGHT, 1915, 1916, SMITH PUBLISHING HOUSE




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Oh!" her voice rippled with laughter, "this is the twentieth century
A.D., not B.C., Daniel" (see page 180)......... _Frontispiece_

"'Benefactor'?" she read, "'a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.'
You see, I'm _your_ benefactor, according to the Standard"

Margaret suddenly laid down her napkin and rushed from the room, every
nerve in her sick and quivering with the physical and moral disgust she
felt

"You will be glad to know, Jennie, that I have persuaded mother to
spend the night with us," Margaret said




HER HUSBAND'S PURSE



I

The Pennsylvania town of New Munich was electrified by the sudden and
entirely unlooked-for announcement of the betrothal of Daniel Leitzel,
Esquire; but his two maiden sisters with whom he lived, and to whom the
news was also wholly unexpected, were appalled, confounded.  That Danny
should have taken such a step independently of them (who did all his
thinking for him outside of his profession) was a cataclysmal episode.
Of course it never would have happened without their knowledge if Danny
had not been temporarily away from his home on business and far removed
from their watchful care--watchful these twenty years past that no
designing Jezebel might get a chance at the great fortune of their
petted little brother--though it must be admitted that Danny was by
this time of a marriageable age, being just turned forty-five.

"To think he'd leave us learn about it in the newspapers yet, sooner 'n
he'd come home and face us with it!  Yes, it looks anyhow as if he was
ashamed of the girl he's picked out!" exclaimed Jennie, a stern and
uncompromising spinster of sixty, as she and her sister Sadie, sitting
in the elaborately furnished and quite hideous sitting-room of their
big, fine house on Main Street, stared in consternation at the glaring
headlines of the New Munich _Evening Intelligencer_, which announced,
in type that to the sisters seemed letters of flame, the upsetting news
of their idolized brother having been at last matrimonially trapped.
Being confronted with his betrothal in print seemed to make it
hopelessly incontrovertible.  They might have schemed to avert the
impending catastrophe of his marriage (in case Danny had been taken in
by an Adventuress) did not the _Intelligencer_ unequivocally state (and
the _Intelligencer's_ statements were scarcely less authoritative to
Jennie and Sadie Leitzel than the Bible itself) that Danny would be
married to the Unknown inside of a month.  If the _Intelligencer_ said
so, it seemed useless to try to stop it.

"To think he'll be married to her already before we get a chance, once,
to look her over and tell him if she'd suit him!" lamented Sadie who
was five years younger than Jennie.

"Well," pronounced Jennie, setting her thin lips in a hard line,
"she'll find out when she gets here that she ain't getting her fingers
on our Danny's money!  She'll get fooled if she's counting on _that_.
She'll soon learn that she'll have to do with just what he likes to
give her and no more!  And of course Danny'll consult _us_ as to just
how much he ought to leave her handle.  When she finds out," Jennie
grimly prophesied, "that our Danny always does the way we advise him to
and that she'll have to keep on the right side of _us_, I guess she
won't like it very well!"

"We can only hope that she ain't such a bold, common thing that just
took our Danny in, that way!" sighed Sadie.

"But why would he hurry it up so, like as if he was afraid we would
mebby put a stop to it?  _She_ put him up to fixing it all tight before
he could change his mind!" Jennie shrewdly surmised.

"It does look that way!" fretted Sadie.

Jennie, the elder sister, was tall, gaunt, and rawboned.  Though
approaching old age, her dominating spirit and grasping ambitions had
preserved her vigour, physically and mentally.  Her sharp face was
deeply lined, but the keenness of her eyes was undimmed, her shoulders
were erect, her hair was thick and black.  The expression of her thin
slit of a mouth was almost relentlessly hard.

Sadie, five years younger, had also a will of her own, but happily it
had always operated on a line so entirely in harmony with that of her
sister, that they had lived together all their lives without friction,
the younger woman unconsciously dominated by the elder.  Indeed, no one
could abide under the same roof with Jennie Leitzel who ventured openly
to differ with her.  Fortunately, even Sadie's passion for dress did
not clash with Jennie's miserliness, for Sadie, too, was miserly, and
Jennie loved to see her younger sister arrayed gorgeously in cheap
finery, her taste inclining to that of a girl of sixteen.  A dormant
mother-instinct, too, such as must exist, however obscurely, in every
frame of woman, even in that of a Jennie Leitzel, found an outlet in
coddling Sadie's health and in ministering to and encouraging a certain
plaintiveness in the younger woman's disposition.  So, these two
sisters, depending upon and complementing each other, of congenial
temperaments, and with but one common paramount interest in life, the
welfare of their incomparable younger brother whom they had brought up
and of whom they were inordinately proud, lived