Mrs. Martin was keeping a secret from her husband. Without his knowledge, she had saved fifty dollars from the household money, with which she intended to buy him a present. For safe-keeping, she had hidden the money in one of her shoes. As Mr. Martin sat reading in their apartment one evening, there rose suddenly on the evening air a weirdly beautiful song, the wild evening chorus of the cats in the neighborhood. Disturbed from his literary researches, Mr. Martin arose, opened the window and flung the first convenient articles which lay at hand at the offending felines. The articles in question happened to be his wife's shoes. Unfortunately, a certain Mr. Thompson happened to be talking to his washerwoman in the alley, on which Mr. Martin's window looked. Mrs. Martin's shoes struck, not the cats, but Mr. Thompson. Boiling with wrath, Mr. Thompson gave the shoe to the washerwoman and departed. The next morning Mrs. Martin missed her shoes. Mr. Martin, with a guilty start, crept down to the alley to look for them. While he was gone, the indignant Mr. Thompson called with a policeman. His angry demands were quickly stilled in the face of Mrs. Martin's lamentations at the discovery that he had given her money-laden shoes to a washerwoman. Mr. Martin overheard the conversation on the doorstep, and rushed off to the washerwoman's house. There he learned that the washerwoman had given the shoes to her son, Denis, that morning. Denis, disliking their feminine appearance, gave them to a girl named Maggie, who sold them to a second-hand dealer, and gave Denis a nickel of the profits. After several attempts to evade each other, Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrived at the second-hand dealers at the same moment. Realizing that there was no use in attempting to deceive each other further, they bought the shoes. When the secondhand dealer saw Mrs. Martin take fifty dollars worth of bills from her purchase, he fainted.