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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10944 ***
+
+FROM A BENCH IN OUR SQUARE
+
+BY
+
+Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+1922
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+_A Patroness of Art_
+
+_The House of Silvery Voices_
+
+_Home-Seekers' Goal_
+
+_The Guardian of God's Acre_
+
+_For Mayme, Read Mary_
+
+_Barbran_
+
+_Plooie of Our Square_
+
+_Triumph_
+
+
+
+
+FROM A BENCH IN OUR SQUARE
+
+
+
+
+A PATRONESS OF ART
+
+
+I
+
+Peter (flourish-in-red) Quick (flourish-in-green) Banta (period-in-blue)
+is the style whereby he is known to Our Square.
+
+Summertimes he is a prop and ornament of Coney, that isle of the blest,
+whose sands he models into gracious forms and noble sentiments, in
+anticipation of the casual dime or the munificent quarter, wherewith, if
+you have low, Philistine tastes or a kind heart, you have perhaps
+aforetime rewarded him. In the off-season the thwarted passion of color
+possesses him; and upon the flagstones before Thornsen's Élite
+Restaurant, which constitutes his canvas, he will limn you a full-rigged
+ship in two colors, a portrait of the heavyweight champion in three, or,
+if financially encouraged, the Statue of Liberty in four. These be,
+however, concessions to popular taste. His own predilection is for
+chaste floral designs of a symbolic character borne out and expounded by
+appropriate legends. Peter Quick Banta is a devotee of his art.
+
+Giving full run to his loftier aspirations, he was engaged, one April
+day, upon a carefully represented lilac with a butterfly about to light
+on it, when he became cognizant of a ragged rogue of an urchin regarding
+him with a grin. Peter Quick Banta misinterpreted this sign of interest.
+
+"What d'ye think of _that_?" he said triumphantly, as he sketched in a
+set of side-whiskers (presumably intended for antennae) upon the
+butterfly.
+
+"Rotten," was the prompt response.
+
+"_What_!" said the astounded artist, rising from his knees.
+
+"Punk."
+
+Peter Quick Banta applied the higher criticism to the urchin's nearest
+ear. It was now that connoisseur's turn to be affronted. Picking himself
+out of the gutter, he placed his thumb to his nose, and wiggled his
+finger in active and reprehensible symbolism, whilst enlarging upon his
+original critique, in a series of shrill roars:
+
+"Rotten! Punk! No good! Swash! Flubdub! Sacré tas de--de--piffle!"
+Already his vocabulary was rich and plenteous, though, in those days,
+tainted by his French origin.
+
+He then, I regret to say, spat upon the purple whiskers of the butterfly
+and took refuge in flight. The long stride of Peter Quick Banta soon
+overtook him. Silently struggling he was haled back to the profaned
+temple of Art.
+
+"Now, young feller," said Peter Quick Banta. "Maybe you think you could
+do it better." The world-old retort of the creative artist to
+his critic!
+
+"Any fool could," retorted the boy, which, in various forms, is almost
+as time-honored as the challenge.
+
+Suspecting that only tactful intervention would forestall possible
+murder, I sauntered over from my bench. But the decorator of sidewalks
+had himself under control.
+
+"Try it," he said grimly.
+
+The boy avidly seized the crayons extended to him.
+
+"You want me to draw a picture? There?"
+
+"If you don't, I'll break every bone in your body."
+
+The threat left its object quite unmoved. He pointed a crayon at Peter
+Quick Banta's creation.
+
+"What is that? A bool-rush?"
+
+"It's a laylock; that's what it is."
+
+"And the little bird that goes to light--"
+
+"That ain't a bird and you know it." Peter Quick Banta breathed hard.
+"That's a butterfly."
+
+"I see. But the lie-lawc, it drop--so!" The gesture was inimitable. "And
+the butterfly, she do not come down, plop! She float--so!" The grimy
+hands fluttered and sank.
+
+"They do, do they? Well, you put it down on the sidewalk."
+
+From that moment the outside world ceased to exist for the urchin. He
+fell to with concentrated fervor, while Peter Quick Banta and I diverted
+the traffic. Only once did he speak:
+
+"Yellow," he said, reaching, but not looking up.
+
+Silently the elder artist put the desired crayon in his hand. When the
+last touches were done, the boy looked up at us, not boastfully, but
+with supreme confidence.
+
+"There!" said he.
+
+It was crude. It was ill-proportioned. The colors were raw. The
+arrangements were false.
+
+_But_--the lilac bloomed. _And_--the butterfly hovered. The artist had
+spoken through his ordained medium and the presentment of life stood
+forth. I hardly dared look at Peter Quick Banta. But beneath his uncouth
+exterior there lay a great and magnanimous soul.
+
+"Son," said he, "you're a wonder. Wanta keep them crayons?"
+
+Unable to speak for the moment, the boy took off his ragged cap in one
+of the most gracious gestures I have ever witnessed, raising dog-like
+eyes of gratitude to his benefactor. Tactfully, Peter Quick Banta
+proceeded to expound for my benefit the technique of the drawing, giving
+the youngster time to recover before the inevitable questioning began.
+
+"Where did you learn that?"
+
+"Nowhere. Had a few drawing lessons at No. 19."
+
+"Would you like to work for me?"
+
+"How?"
+
+Peter Quick Banta pointed to the sidewalk.
+
+"That?" The boy laughed happily. "That ain't work. That's fun."
+
+So the partnership was begun, the boy, whose name was Julien Tennier
+(soon simplified into Tenney for local use), sharing Peter Quick Banta's
+roomy garret. Success, modest but unfailing, attended it from the first
+appearance of the junior member of the firm at Coney Island, where, as
+the local cognoscenti still maintain, he revolutionized the art and
+practice of the "sand-dabs." Out of the joint takings grew a bank
+account. Eventually Peter Quick Banta came to me about the boy's
+education.
+
+"He's a swell," said Peter Quick Banta. "Look at that face! I don't care
+if he did crawl outa the gutter. I'm an artist and I reco'nize
+aristocracy when I see it. And I want him brung up accordin'."
+
+So I inducted the youngster into such modest groves of learning as an
+old, half-shelved pedagogue has access to, and when the Bonnie Lassie
+came to Our Square to make herself and us famous with her tiny bronzes
+(this was before she had captured, reformed, and married Cyrus the
+Gaunt), I took him to her and he fell boyishly and violently in love
+with her beauty and her genius alike, all of which was good for his
+developing soul. She arranged for his art training.
+
+"But you know, Dominie," she used to say, wagging her head like a
+profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted
+on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be
+doing work that will make people forget poor little me and my poor
+little figurines."
+
+To which I replied that even if it were true, instead of the veriest
+nonsense, about Julien Tenney or any one else ever eclipsing her, she
+would help him just the same!
+
+But five years from then Julien had gone over to the Philistines.
+
+
+II
+
+Justly catalogued, Roberta Holland belonged to the idle rich. She would
+have objected to the latter classification, averring that, with the
+rising cost of furs and automobile upkeep, she had barely enough to keep
+her head above the high tide of Fifth Avenue prices. As to idleness, she
+scorned the charge. Had she not, throughout the war, performed
+prodigious feats of committee work, all of it meritorious and some of it
+useful? She had. It had left her with a dangerous and destructive
+appetite for doing good to people. Aside from this, Miss Roberta was a
+distracting young person. Few looked at her once without wanting to look
+again, and not a few looked again to their undoing.
+
+Being-done-good-to is, I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of
+Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large
+and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As
+recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland
+transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the
+world she met with a lack of response which might have discouraged one
+with a less new and superior sense of duty to the lower orders. She came
+to us through the Bonnie Lassie, guardian of the gateway from the upper
+strata to our humbler domain, who--Pagan that she is!--indiscriminately
+accepts all things beautiful simply for their beauty. Having arrived,
+Miss Holland proceeded to organize us with all the energy of
+high-blooded sweet-and-twenty and all the imperiousness of confident
+wealth and beauty. She organized an evening sewing-circle for women
+whose eyelids would not stay open after their long day's work. She
+formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon Coventry, the
+printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and MacLachan, the
+tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light reading. She delivered
+some edifying exhortations upon the subject of Americanism to Polyglot
+Elsa, of the Élite Restaurant (who had taken upon her sturdy young
+shoulders the support of an old mother and a paralytic sister, so that
+her two brothers might enlist for the war--a detail of patriotism which
+the dispenser of platitudes might have learned by judicious inquiry).
+And so forth and so on. Miss Roberta Holland meant well, but she had
+many things to learn and no master to teach her.
+
+Yet when the flu epidemic returned upon us, she stood by, efficient,
+deft, and gallant, though still imperious, until the day when she
+clashed her lath-and-tinsel sword of theory against the tempered steel
+of the Little Red Doctor's experience. Said the Little Red Doctor (who
+was pressed for time at the moment): "Take orders. Or get out. Which?"
+
+She straightened like a soldier. "Tell me what you want done."
+
+At the end of the onset, when he gave her her release from volunteer
+service, she turned shining eyes upon him. "I've never been so treated
+in my life! You're a bully and a brute."
+
+"You're a brick," retorted the Little Red Doctor. "I'll send for you
+next time Our Square needs help."
+
+"I'll come," said she, and they shook hands solemnly.
+
+Thereafter Our Square felt a little more lenient toward her
+ministrations, and even those of us who least approved her activities
+felt the stir of radiance and color which she brought with her.
+
+On a day when the local philanthropy market was slack, and Miss Holland,
+seated in the Bonnie Lassie's front window, was maturing some new and
+benign outrage upon our sensibilities, she called out to the sculptress
+at work on a group:
+
+"There's a queer man making queer marks on your sidewalk."
+
+"That's Peter Quick Banta. He's a fellow artist."
+
+"And another man, young, with a big, maney head like an amiable lion;
+quite a beautiful lion. He's making more marks."
+
+"Let him make all he wants."
+
+"They're waving their arms at each other. At least the queer man is. I
+think they're going to fight."
+
+"They won't. It's only an academic discussion on technique."
+
+"Who is the young one?"
+
+"He's the ruin of what might have been a big artist."
+
+"No! Is he? What did it? Drink?"
+
+"Does he look it?"
+
+The window-gazer peered more intently at the debaters below. "It's a
+peculiar face. Awfully interesting, though. He's quite poorly dressed.
+Does he need money? Is that what's wrong?"
+
+"That's it, Bobbie," returned the Bonnie Lassie with a half-smile. "He
+needs the money."
+
+The rampant philanthropist stirred within Miss Roberta Holland's fatally
+well-meaning soul. "Would it be a case where I could help? I'd love to
+put a real artist back on his feet. Are you sure he's real?"
+
+On the subject of Art, the Bonnie Lassie is never anything but sincere
+and direct, however much she may play her trickeries with lesser
+interests, such as life and love and human fate.
+
+"No; I'm not. If he were, I doubt whether he'd have let himself go so
+wrong."
+
+"Perhaps it isn't too late," said the amateur missionary hopefully. "Is
+he a man to whom one could offer money?"
+
+The Bonnie Lassie's smile broadened without change in its subtle
+quality. "Julien Tenney isn't exactly a pauper. He just thinks he can't
+afford to do the kind of thing he wants and ought to."
+
+"What ought he to do?"
+
+"Paint--paint--paint!" said the Bonnie Lassie vehemently. "Five years
+ago I believe he had the makings of a great painter in him. And now look
+what he's doing!"
+
+"Making marks on sidewalks, you mean?"
+
+"Worse. Commercial art."
+
+"Designs and that sort of thing?"
+
+"Do you ever look at the unearthly beautiful, graceful and gloriously
+dressed young super-Americans who appear in the advertisements, riding
+in super-cars or wearing super-clothes or brushing super-teeth with
+super-toothbrushes?"
+
+"I suppose so," said the girl vaguely.
+
+"He draws those."
+
+"Is that what you call pot-boiling?"
+
+"One kind."
+
+"And I suppose it pays just a pittance."
+
+"Well," replied the Bonnie Lassie evasively, "he sticks to it, so it
+must support him."
+
+"Then I'm going to help him."
+
+"'To fulfill his destiny,' is the accepted phrase," said the Bonnie
+Lassie wickedly. "I'll call him in for you to look over. But you'd best
+leave the arrangements for a later meeting."
+
+Being summoned, Julien Tenney entered the house as one quite at home
+despite his smeary garb of the working artist. His presentation to Miss
+Holland was as brief as it was formal, for she took her departure
+at once.
+
+"Who is she?" asked Julien, staring after her.
+
+"Bobbie Holland, a gilded butterfly from uptown."
+
+"What's she doing here?"
+
+"Good."
+
+"O Lord!" said he in pained tones. "Has she got a Cause?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Philanthropist?"
+
+"Worse."
+
+"There ain't no sich a animile."
+
+"There is. She's a patron of art."
+
+"Wow!"
+
+"Yes. She's going to patronize you."
+
+"Not if I see her first. How do _I_ qualify as a subject?"
+
+"She considered you a wasted life."
+
+"Where does she get that idea?"
+
+The Bonnie Lassie removed a small, sharp implement from the left eye of
+a stoical figurine and pointed it at herself.
+
+"Do you think that's fair?" demanded the indignant youth.
+
+The Bonnie Lassie reversed the implement and pointed it at him. "Do you
+or do you not," she challenged, "invade our humble precincts in a
+five-thousand-dollar automobile?"
+
+"It's my only extravagance."
+
+"Do you or do you not maintain a luxurious apartment in Gramercy Park,
+when you are not down here posing in your attic as an honest
+working-man?"
+
+"Oh, see here, Mrs. Staten, I won't stand for that!" he expostulated.
+"You know perfectly well I keep my room here because it's the only place
+I can work in quietly--"
+
+"And because Peter Quick Banta would break his foolish old heart if you
+left him entirely," supplemented the sculptress.
+
+Julien flushed and stood looking like an awkward child. "Did you tell
+all this stuff to Miss Holland?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no! She thinks that your pot-boiling is a desperate and barely
+sufficient expedient to keep the wolf from the door. So she is planning
+to help you realize your destiny."
+
+"Which is?" he queried with lifted brows.
+
+"To be a great painter."
+
+The other winced. "As you know, I've meant all along, as soon as I've
+saved enough--"
+
+"Oh, yes; _I_ know," broke in the Bonnie Lassie, who can be quite
+ruthless where Art is concerned, "and _you_ know; but time flies and
+hell is paved with good intentions, and if you want to be that kind of a
+pavement artist--well, I think Peter Quick Banta is a better."
+
+"Do you suppose she'd let me paint her?" he asked abruptly.
+
+If statuettes could blink, the one upon which the Bonnie Lassie was
+busied would certainly have shrouded its vision against the dazzling
+radiance of her smile, for this was coming about as she had planned it
+from the moment when she had caught the flash of startled surprise and
+wonder in his eyes, as they first rested on Bobbie Holland. Here, she
+had guessed, might be the agency to bring Julien Tenney to his artistic
+senses; and even so it was now working out. But all she said was--and
+she said it with a sort of venomous blandness--"My dear boy, you
+can't paint."
+
+"Can't I! Just because I'm a little out of practice--"
+
+"Two years, isn't it, since you've touched a palette?"
+
+"Give me a chance at such a model as she is! That's all I ask."
+
+"Do you think her so pretty?" inquired the sculptress disparagingly.
+
+"Pretty? She's the loveliest thing that--" Catching his hostess's smile
+he broke off. "You'll admit it's a well-modeled face," he said
+professionally; "and--and--well, unusual."
+
+"Pooh! 'Dangerous' is the word. Remember it," warned the Bonnie Lassie.
+"She's a devastating whirlwind, that child, and she comes down here
+partly to get away from the wreckage. Now, if you play your part
+cleverly--"
+
+"I'm not going to play any part."
+
+"Then it's all up. How is a patroness of Art going to patronize you,
+unless you're a poor and struggling young artist, living from hand to
+mouth by arduous pot-boiling? You won't have to play a part as far as
+the pot-boiling goes," added his monitress viciously. "Only, don't let
+her know that the rewards of your shame run to high-powered cars and
+high-class apartments. Remember, you're poor but honest. Perhaps she'll
+give you money."
+
+"Perhaps she won't," retorted the youth explosively.
+
+"Oh, it will be done tactfully; never fear. I'll bring her around to see
+you and you'll have to work the sittings yourself."
+
+As a setting for the abode of a struggling beginner, Julien's attic
+needed no change. It was a whim of his to keep it bare and simple. He
+worked out his pictorial schemes of elegance best in an environment
+where there was nothing to distract the eye. One could see that Miss
+Roberta Holland, upon her initial visit, approved its stark and cleanly
+poverty. (Yes, I was there to see; the Bonnie Lassie had taken me along
+to make up that first party.) Having done the honors, Julien dropped
+into the background, and presently was curled up over a drawing-board,
+sketching eagerly while the Bonnie Lassie and I held the doer of good
+deeds in talk. Now the shrewd and able tribe of advertising managers do
+not pay to any but a master-draughtsman the prices which "J.T."--with
+an arrow transfixing the initials--gets; and Julien was as deft and
+rapid as he was skillful. Soon appreciating what was in progress, the
+visitor graciously sat quite still. At the conclusion she held out her
+hand for the cardboard.
+
+To be a patroness of Art does not necessarily imply that one is an
+adequate critic. Miss Holland contemplated what was a veritable little
+gem in black-and-white with cool approbation.
+
+"Quite clever," she was pleased to say. "Would you care to sell it?"
+
+"I don't think it would be exactly--" A stern glance from the Bonnie
+Lassie cut short the refusal. He swallowed the rest of the sentence.
+
+"Would ten dollars be too little?" asked the visitor with bright
+beneficence.
+
+"Too much," he murmured. (The Bonnie Lassie says that with a little
+crayoning and retouching he could have sold it for at least fifty
+times that.)
+
+The patroness delicately dropped a bill on the table.
+
+"Could you some day find time to let me try you in oils?" he asked.
+
+"Does that take long?" she said doubtfully. "I'm very busy."
+
+"You really should try it, Bobbie," put in the crafty Bonnie Lassie. "It
+might give him the start he needs."
+
+What arguments she added later is a secret between the two women, but
+she had her way. The Bonnie Lassie always does. So the bare studio was
+from time to time irradiated with Bobbie Holland's youthful loveliness
+and laughter. For there was much laughter between those two. Shrewdly
+foreseeing that this bird of paradise would return to the bare cage only
+if it were made amusing for her, Julien exerted himself to the utmost to
+keep her mind at play, and, as I can vouch who helped train him, there
+are few men of his age who can be as absorbing a companion as Julien
+when he chooses to exert his charm. All the time, he was working with a
+passionate intensity on the portrait; letting everything else go;
+tossing aside the most remunerative offers; leaving his mail unopened;
+throwing himself intensely, recklessly, into this one single enterprise.
+The fact is, he had long been starved for color and was now satiating
+his soul with it. Probably it was largely impersonal with him at first.
+The Bonnie Lassie, wise of heart that she is, thinks so. But that could
+not last. Men who are not otherwise safeguarded do not long retain a
+neutral attitude toward such creatures of grace and splendor as
+Bobbie Holland.
+
+Between them developed a curious relation. It was hardly to be called
+friendship; he was not, to Bobbie's recognition, a habitant of her
+world. Nor, certainly, was it anything more. Julien would as soon have
+renounced easel and canvas as have taken advantage of her coming to make
+love to her. In this waif of our gutters and ward of our sidewalk artist
+inhered a spirit of the most punctilious and rigid honor, the gift,
+perhaps, of some forgotten ancestry. More and more, as the intimacy
+grew, he deserted his uptown haunts and stuck to the attic studio above
+the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed
+Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a
+bath, and a gas stove. Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more
+surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for
+sittings now. Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan
+Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view
+to helping her protégé form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie
+Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!
+
+"This is all very well," he said, one day in the sculptress's studio;
+"but sooner or later she's going to catch me at it."
+
+"What then?" asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.
+
+"She'll go away."
+
+"Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes. That'll be finished."
+
+This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up. Immediately she looked back
+again.
+
+"In any case she'll have to go away some day--won't she?"
+
+"I suppose so," returned he in a gloomy growl.
+
+"I warned you at the outset, 'Dangerous,'" she pointed out.
+
+They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien
+Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I
+saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding
+orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely
+unconscious of any incongruity.
+
+"Do you think," I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one
+afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her
+car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or
+ought to?"
+
+"Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie
+with dignity.
+
+"I'm quite serious," I protested.
+
+"And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know
+her."
+
+"Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident
+fact?"
+
+"Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a
+little spoiled."
+
+"So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled."
+
+"Julien won't spoil her."
+
+"He certainly doesn't appear to bore her."
+
+"She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is
+doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful
+and all that sort of stuff."
+
+"Lassie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?"
+
+"Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved.
+"However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's
+_mine_, that big idea."
+
+"Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the
+experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when
+Bobbie Holland goes?"
+
+"Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains.
+
+Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the
+painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be
+said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished
+along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of
+historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session,
+displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon
+the plastering Béranger's famous line:
+
+  "Dans un grenier qu'on est bien á vingt ans!"
+
+"Did you write that there?" asked the girl.
+
+"Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word."
+
+"How did you come to know Béranger?"
+
+"I'm French born."
+
+"'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I
+wouldn't have thought"--she turned her softly brilliant regard upon
+him--"that life had been so good to you."
+
+"It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now."
+
+"I've often wondered--you seem to know so many things--where you got
+your education?"
+
+"Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing."
+(Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of
+brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)
+
+"You're a very puzzling person," said she And when a woman says that to
+a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie Lassie, who knows
+everything, is my authority for the statement.)
+
+To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien's "grenier" that
+day.
+
+"Cecily," she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, "who
+_is_ Julien Tenney?"
+
+"Nobody."
+
+"You know what I mean," pleaded the girl. "_What_ is he?"
+
+"A brand snatched from the pot-boiling," returned the Bonnie Lassie,
+quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.
+
+"Please don't be clever. Be nice and tell me--"
+
+"'Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the
+Bonnie Lassie, who was feeling perverse that day. "You want me to define
+his social status for you and tell you whether you'd better invite him
+to dinner. You'd better not. He might swallow his knife."
+
+"You know he wouldn't!" denied the girl in resentful tones. "I've never
+known any one with more instinctive good manners. He seems to go right
+naturally."
+
+"All due to my influence and training," bragged the Bonnie Lassie. "I
+helped bring him up."
+
+"Then you must know something of his antecedents."
+
+"Ask the Dominie. He says that Julien crawled out of a gutter with the
+manners of a _preux chevalier_. Anyway, he never swallowed any of _my_
+knives. Though he's had plenty of opportunity."
+
+"It's very puzzling," lamented Bobbie.
+
+"Why let it prey like a worm i' the bud of your mind? You're not going
+to adopt him, perhaps?"
+
+For the moment Bobbie Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue
+unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a
+gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem.
+
+"Umph!" said the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+And continued sculpting.
+
+
+III
+
+As Julien had prophesied, it was only a question of time when he would
+be surprised by his patroness in his true garb and estate. The event
+occurred as he was stepping from his touring-car to get his golf-clubs
+from the hallway of his Gramercy Park apartment at the very moment when
+Bobbie Holland emerged from the house next door. Both her hands flew
+involuntarily to her cheeks, as she took in and wholly misinterpreted
+his costume, which is not to be wondered at when one considers the
+similarity of a golfing outfit to a chauffeur's livery.
+
+"Oh!" she cried out, as if something had hurt her.
+
+Julien, for once startled out of his accustomed poise, uncovered and
+looked at her apprehensively.
+
+Her voice quivered a little as she asked, very low, "Do you _have_ to do
+that?"
+
+"Why--er--no," began the puzzled Julien, who failed for the moment to
+perceive what of tragic portent inhered in a prospective afternoon of
+golf. Her next words enlightened him.
+
+"I should think you might have let me help before taking a--servant's
+position."
+
+"It's an honest occupation," he averred.
+
+"Do you do this--regularly?" she pursued with an effort.
+
+"Off and on. There's good money in it."
+
+"Oh!" she mourned again. Then: "You're doing this so that you can afford
+to buy paints and canvas and--and things to paint me," she accused. "It
+isn't fair!"
+
+"I'd do worse than this for that," he declared valiantly.
+
+Less than a fortnight later she caught him doing worse. She had ceased
+to speak to him of his chauffeurdom because it seemed to cause him
+painful embarrassment. (It did, and should have!) There had been a big
+theater party, important enough to get itself detailed in the valuable
+columns which the papers devote to such matters, and afterward supper at
+the most expensive uptown restaurant, Miss Roberta Holland being one of
+the listed guests. As she took her place at the table, she caught a
+glimpse of an unmistakable figure disappearing through the waiter's
+exit. And Julien Tenney, who had risen from his little supper party of
+four (stag) hastily but just too late, on catching sight of her, saw
+that he was recognized. Flight, instant and permanent, had been his
+original intent. Now it would not do. Bolder measures must be devised.
+He appealed to the head-waiter to help him carry out a joke, and that
+functionary, developing a sense of humor under the stimulus of a
+twenty-dollar bill, procured him on the spot an ill-fitting coat and a
+black string tie, and gave him certain simple directions. When the
+patroness of Art next observed the object of her patronage, he was
+performing the humble but useful duties of an omnibus.
+
+Miss Holland suddenly lost a perfectly good and hitherto reliable
+appetite.
+
+Nor was she the only member of the supper party to develop symptoms of
+shock. The gilded and stalwart youth on her left, following her glance,
+stared at the amateur servitor with protruding eyes, ceased to eat or
+drink, and fell into a state of semi-coma, muttering at intervals an
+expressive monosyllable.
+
+"Why not swear out loud, Caspar?" asked Bobbie presently. "It'll do you
+less harm."
+
+"D'you see that chap over yonder? The big, fine-looking one fixing the
+forks?"
+
+"Yes," said Bobbie faintly.
+
+"Well, that's--No, by thunder, it can't be!--Yes, by the red-hot hinges,
+it _is!_"
+
+"Do you think you know him?"
+
+"Know him! I _know_ him? He bunked in with me for two weeks at Grandpré.
+He was captain of a machine-gun outfit sent down to help us clean out
+that little wasp's nest. His name's Tenney, and if ever there was a
+hellion in a fight! And see--what he's come to! My God!"
+
+"Well, don't cry about it," advised the girl, serenely, though it was
+hard for her to keep her voice steady. "There's nothing to do about it,
+is there?"
+
+"Isn't there!" retorted the youth, rising purposefully. "I'm going to
+get him and find him a job that's fit for him if I have to take him into
+partnership. Of all the dash-blanked-dod-blizzened--"
+
+"Caspar! What are you going to do? Don't. You'll embarrass him
+frightfully."
+
+But he was already heading off his prey at the exit. Bobbie saw her
+painter's face flame into welcome, then stiffen into dismay. The pair
+vanished beyond the watcher's ken. On his return the gilded youth
+behaved strangely. From time to time he shook his head. From time to
+time he chuckled. And, while Bobbie was talking to her other neighbor,
+he shot curious and amused glances at her. He told her nothing. But his
+interest in his supper returned. Bobbie's didn't.
+
+To discuss the social aspects of menial service with a practitioner of
+it who has been admitted to a certain implicit equality is a difficult
+and delicate matter for a girl brought up in Roberta Holland's school.
+Several times after the restaurant encounter she essayed it; trying both
+the indirect approach and the method of extreme frankness. Neither
+answered. Julien responded to her advances by alternate moods of extreme
+gloom and slyly inexplicable amusement. Bobbie gave it up, concluding
+that he was in a very queer mood, anyway. She was right. He was.
+
+The next episode of their progress took the form of a veritable
+unmasking which, perversely enough, only fixed the mask tighter upon
+Julien Tenney. By way of loosening up his wrist for the open season,
+Peter Quick Banta had taken advantage of an amiable day to sketch out a
+composite floral and faunal scheme on the flagging in front of
+Thornsen's Élite Restaurant, when Miss Holland, in passing, paused to
+observe and wonder. At the same moment, Julien hurrying around the
+corner, all but ran her down. She nodded toward the decorator of
+sidewalks.
+
+"Isn't he the funny man that you were with the first time I saw you?"
+
+"The very same," responded Julien with twinkling eyes.
+
+"What is he doing?"
+
+"He's one of the few remaining examples of the sidewalk or public-view
+school of art."
+
+"Yes, but what does he do it for?"
+
+"His living."
+
+"Do people give him money for it? Do you think I might give him
+something?" she asked, looking uncertainly at the artist, who, on hands
+and knees and with tongue protruding, was putting a green head on a red
+bird, too absorbed even to notice the onlookers.
+
+"I think he'd be tickled pink."
+
+She took a quarter from her purse, hesitated, then slipped it into her
+companion's hand.
+
+"_You_ give it to him. I think he'd like it better."
+
+"Oh, no; I don't think he'd like it at all. In fact, I doubt if he'd
+take it from me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, you see," explained Julien blandly, "we're rather intimately
+connected." He raised his voice. "Hello, Dad!"
+
+The decorator furled his tongue, lifted his head, changed his crayon,
+replied, "Hello, Lad," and continued his work. "What d' you think of
+_that_?" he added, after a moment, triumphantly pointing a yellow crayon
+at the green-headed red-bird.
+
+"Some parrot!" enthused Julien.
+
+"'T ain't a parrot. It's a nightingale," retorted the artist
+indignantly. "You black-and-white fellows never do understand color."
+
+"It's a corker, anyway," said Julien. "Dad here's a--an art patron who
+wants to contribute to the cause."
+
+The girl, whose face had become flushed and almost frightened, held out
+her quarter.
+
+"I--I--don't know," she began. "I was interested in your picture and I
+thought--Mr. Tenney said--"
+
+Peter Quick Banta took the coin with perfect dignity. "Thank you," said
+he. "There ain't much appreciation of art just at this season. But if
+you'll come down to Coney about June, I'll show you some sand-modeling
+that _is_ sand-modeling--'s much as five dollars a day I've taken
+in there."
+
+Miss Holland recovered her social poise.
+
+"I'd like to very much," she said cheerfully.
+
+She and Julien walked on in silence. Suddenly he laughed, a little
+jarringly. "Well," he said, "does that help you to place me?"
+
+"I'm not trying to place you," she answered.
+
+"Is that quite true?" he mocked.
+
+"No; it isn't. It's a downright lie," said Bobbie finding courage to
+raise her eyes to his.
+
+"And now, I suppose, I shall be 'my good man' or something like that, to
+you."
+
+"Do you think it likely?"
+
+"You called MacLachan that, you know," he reminded her.
+
+"Long ago. When I was--when I didn't understand Our Square."
+
+"And now, of course, our every feeling and thought is an open book to
+your penetrating vision."
+
+Her lip quivered. "I don't know why you should want to be so hateful to
+me."
+
+For a flashing second his eyes answered that appeal with a look that
+thrilled and daunted her. "To keep from being something else that I've
+no right to be," he muttered.
+
+"How many more sittings do you think it will take to finish the
+picture?" she asked, striving to get on safer ground.
+
+"Only one or two, I suppose," he answered morosely.
+
+Such was Julien's condition of mind after the last sitting that he
+actually left the precious portrait unguarded by neglecting to lock the
+door of the studio on going out, and the Bonnie Lassie and I, happening
+in, beheld it in its fulfillment. A slow flush burned its way upward in
+the Bonnie Lassie's face as she studied it.
+
+"He's done it!" she exclaimed. "Flower and flame! Why did I ever take to
+sculpture? One can't get that in the metal."
+
+"He's done it," I echoed.
+
+"Of course, technically, it's rather a sloppy picture."
+
+"It's a glorious picture!" I cried.
+
+"Naturally that," returned the exasperating critic. "It always will
+be--when you paint with your heart's blood."
+
+"Do you think your friend Bobbie appreciates the medium in which she's
+presented?"
+
+"If she doesn't--which she probably does," said the Bonnie Lassie, "she
+will find out something to her advantage when she sees me to-morrow. I'm
+going home to 'phone her."
+
+In answer to the summons, Bobbie came. She looked, I thought, as I saw
+her from my bench, troubled and perplexed and softened, and glowingly
+lovely. At the door of the Bonnie Lassie's house she was met with the
+challenge direct.
+
+"What have you been doing to my artistic ward?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Bobbie with unwonted meekness, and to prove it
+related the incidents of the touring-car, the supper at the Taverne
+Splendide, and the encounter with the paternal colorist.
+
+"That isn't Julien's father," said the sculptress. "He's only an
+adoptive father. But Julien adores him, as he ought to. The real father,
+so I've heard, was a French gentleman--"
+
+"I don't care who his father was!" cried Bobbie. (The Bonnie Lassie's
+face took on the expression of an exclamation point.) "I can't bear to
+think of his having to do servant's work. And I told him so yesterday."
+
+"Did you look like that while you were telling him?"
+
+"Like what? I suppose so."
+
+"And what did he do?"
+
+"Do? He didn't do anything."
+
+"Then," pronounced the Bonnie Lassie, "he's a stick of
+wood--hardwood--with a knot-hole for a heart."
+
+"He isn't! Well, perhaps he is. He was very horrid at the last."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"About taking money."
+
+"I'm a prophetess! And you're a patroness. Born in us, I suppose. You
+_did_ try to give him money."
+
+"Just to loan it. Enough so that he could go away to study and paint. He
+wouldn't even let me do that; so I--I--I offered to buy the picture of
+me, and he said--he said--Cecily, do you think he's sometimes a little
+queer in his head?"
+
+"Not in the head, necessarily. _What_ did he say?"
+
+"He said he'd bought it himself at the highest price ever paid. And he
+said it so obstinately that I saw it was no use, so I just told him that
+I hoped I'd see him when I came back--"
+
+"Back from where? Are you going away?"
+
+"Yes; didn't I tell you? On a three months' cruise."
+
+"Had you told him that?"
+
+"Of course. That's when I tried to get him to take the money. Cecily--"
+The girl's voice shook a little. "You'll tell him, won't you, that he
+_must_ keep on painting?"
+
+"Why? Doesn't he intend to?"
+
+"He said he'd painted himself out and he didn't think he'd ever _look_
+at color again."
+
+"He will," said the Bonnie Lassie wisely and comfortably. "Grief is just
+as driving a taskmaster as lo--as other emotions."
+
+"Grief!" The girl's color ebbed. "Cecily! You don't think I've hurt
+him?"
+
+The Bonnie Lassie caught her in a sudden hug.
+
+"Bobbie, do you know what I'd do in your place?"
+
+"No. What?"
+
+"I'd go right--straight--back to Julien Tenney's studio." She paused
+impressively.
+
+"Yes?" said the other faintly.
+
+"And I'd walk right--straight--up to Julien Tenney--" Another pause,
+even more impressive.
+
+"I d-d-don't think I'd--he'd--"
+
+"And I'd say to him: 'Julien, will you marry me?' Like that."
+
+"Oh!" said Bobbie in outraged amazement.
+
+"And maybe--" continued the Bonnie Lassie judicially: "maybe I'd kiss
+him. Yes. I think I would."
+
+Suddenly all the bright softness of Bobbie's large eyes dissolved in
+tears. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she sobbed.
+
+"You won't be ashamed of _yourself_," prophesied the other, "if you do
+just as I say, quickly and naturally."
+
+"Oh, naturally," retorted the girl in an indignant whimper. "I suppose
+you think that's natural. Anyway, he probably doesn't care about me at
+all that way."
+
+"Roberta," said the sculptress sternly, "did you _see_ his portrait of
+you?"
+
+"Y-y-yes."
+
+"And you have the presumption to say that he doesn't care? Why, that
+picture doesn't simply tell his secret. It _yells_ it!"
+
+"I don't care," said the hard-pressed Bobbie. "It hasn't yelled it to
+me. _Nobody's_ yelled it to me. And I c-c-can't ask a m-m-man to--to--"
+
+"Perhaps you can't," allowed her adviser magnanimously. "On second
+thought, it won't be necessary. You just go back--after powdering your
+nose a little--and say that you've come to see the picture once more, or
+that it's a fine day, or that competition is the life of trade, or
+that--oh, anything! And, if he doesn't do the rest, I'll kill and
+eat him."
+
+"But, Cecily--"
+
+"You _would_ be a patroness of Art. Now I've given you something real to
+patronize. Don't you dare fail me." Suddenly the speaker gave herself
+over to an access of mirth. "Heaven help that young man when he comes
+to own up."
+
+"Own up to what?"
+
+"Never mind."
+
+Having consumed a vain and repetitious half-hour in variations upon her
+query, Bobbie gave it up and decided to find out for herself. It was
+curiosity and curiosity alone (so she assured herself) that impelled her
+to return for the last time (she assured herself of that, also) to
+the attic.
+
+A voice raised in vehement protest, echoing through the open door of the
+studio, checked her on the landing below as she mounted.
+
+"And you're actually going to let thirty-five thousand a year slip
+through your fingers, just to pursue a fad?"
+
+To which Julien's equable accents replied:
+
+"That's it, Merrill. I'm going to paint."
+
+The unseen Merrill left a blessing (of a sort) behind, slammed the door
+upon it, and materialized to the vision of the girl on the landing as an
+energetic and spruce-looking man of forty-odd, with a harassed
+expression. At need, Miss Holland could summon considerable decisiveness
+to her aid.
+
+"Would you think me inexcusably rude," she said softly, "if I asked who
+you are?"
+
+The descending man snatched off his hat, stared, seemed on the point of
+whistling, then, recovering himself, said courteously: "I'm George
+Merrill, advertising manager for the Criterion Clothing Company."
+
+"And Mr. Tenney has been doing drawings for you?"
+
+"He has. For several years."
+
+"So that," said the girl, half to herself, "is his pot-boiling."
+
+"Not a very complimentary term," commented Mr. Merrill, "for the best
+black-and-white work being done in New York to-day. Between my concern
+and two others he makes a railroad president's income out of it."
+
+"Yes, I overheard what you said to him. Thank you so much."
+
+"In return, may I ask you something?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Will you not, for his own good, dissuade Mr. Tenney from throwing away
+his career?"
+
+"Why should you suppose me to have any influence with Mr. Tenney?"
+
+Mr. Merrill's face was grave, as befitted the issue, but a twinkle
+appeared at the corner of his glasses. "I've seen the portrait," he
+replied, and with a bow, went on his way.
+
+Julien opened the door to her knock. She stepped inside, facing him with
+bright, inscrutable eyes.
+
+"Why have you been fooling me about your circumstances?" she demanded.
+
+"D---n Merrill!" said Julien with fervor.
+
+"It's true that your 'pot-boiling' brings you a big income?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then why do you take employment as a chauffeur?"
+
+"I don't. That car belongs to me."
+
+"And your being a waiter? I don't suppose the Taverne Splendide belongs
+to you?"
+
+"An impromptu bit of acting," confessed the abashed Julien.
+
+"And this attic? Was that hired for the same comedy?"
+
+"No. This is mine, really."
+
+"I don't understand. Why have you done it all?"
+
+"If you want to know the truth," he said defiantly, "so that I could
+keep on seeing you."
+
+"That's a very poor excuse," she retorted.
+
+"The best in the world. As a successful commercial artist, what possible
+interest would you have taken in me? You took me for a struggling young
+painter--that was the Bonnie Lassie's fault, for I never lied to you
+about it--and after we'd started on that track I didn't--well, I didn't
+have the courage to risk losing you by quitting the masquerade."
+
+"How you must have laughed at me all the time!"
+
+He flushed to his angry eyes. "Do you think that is fair?" he retorted.
+"Or kind? Or true?"
+
+"I--I don't know," she faltered. "You let me offer you money. And you've
+probably got as much as I have."
+
+"I won't have from now on, then. I'm going to paint. I thought, when you
+told me you were going away, that I couldn't look at a canvas again. But
+now I know I was wrong. I've got to paint. You'll have left me that,
+at least."
+
+"Mr. Merrill thinks you're ruining your career. And if you do, it'll be
+my fault. I'll never, never, never," said the patroness of Art
+desolately, "try to do any one good again!"
+
+She turned toward the door.
+
+"At least," said Julien in a voice which threatened to get out of
+control, "you'll know that it wasn't all masquerade. You'll know why
+I'll always keep the picture, even if I never paint another."
+
+She stole a look at him over her shoulder and, with a thrill, saw the
+passion in his eyes and the pride that withheld him from speaking.
+
+"Suppose," she said, "I asked you to give it up."
+
+"You wouldn't," he retorted quickly.
+
+"No, I wouldn't. But--but--" Her glance, wandering away from him, fell
+on the joyous line of Béranger bold above the door.
+
+"'How good is life in an attic at twenty,'" she murmured. Then, turning
+to him, she held out her hands.
+
+"I could find it good," she said with a soft little falter in her voice,
+"even at twenty-two."
+
+Everything passes in review before my bench, sooner or later. The two,
+going by with transfigured faces, stopped.
+
+"Let's tell Dominie," said Julien.
+
+I waved a jaunty hand. "I know already," said I, "even if it hadn't been
+announced to a waiting world."
+
+"Wh-wh-why," stammered Bobbie with a blush worth a man's waiting a
+lifetime to see, "it--it only just happened."
+
+"Bless your dear, innocent hearts, both of you! It's been happening for
+weeks. Come with me."
+
+I lead them to the sidewalk fronting Thornsen's Élite Restaurant. There
+stood Peter Quick Banta, admiring his latest masterpiece of imaginative
+symbolism. It represented a love-bird of eagle size holding in its
+powerful beak a scroll with a wreath of forget-me-nots on one end and of
+orange-blossoms on the other, encircling respectively the initials.
+"J.T." and "R.H." Below, in no less than four colors, ran the legend,
+"Cupid's Token."
+
+"O Lord! Dad!" cried the horrified Julien, scuffing it out with frantic
+feet. "How long has this been there?"
+
+"What're you doing? Leave it be!" cried the anguished artist. "It's been
+there since noon."
+
+"Never mind," put in Bobbie softly; "it's very pretty and tasteful even
+though it is a little precipitate. But how"--she turned the lovely and
+puzzled inquiry of her eyes upon the symbolist--"how did you know?"
+
+"Artistic intuition," said Peter Quick Banta with profound complacency.
+"_I'm_ an artist."
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF SILVERY VOICES
+
+Wayfarers on the far side of Our Square used to stop before Number 37
+and wonder. The little house, it seemed, was making music at them.
+"Kleam, kleam, kleam, kleam," it would pipe pleasantly.
+
+"BHONG! BHONG! BHONG!" solemn and churchly, in rebuke of its own levity.
+
+"Kung-_glang_! Kung-_glang_! Kung-_glang_! Kung-_glang_! Kung-_glang_!"
+That was a duet in the middle register.
+
+Then from some far-off aerie would ring the tocsin of an elfin
+silversmith, fast, furious, and tiny:
+
+"Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping!"
+
+We surmised that a retired Swiss bell-ringer had secluded himself in our
+remote backwater of the great city to mature fresh combinations of
+his art.
+
+Before the Voices came, Number 37 was as quiet a house as any in the
+Square. Quieter than most, since it was vacant much of the time and the
+ceremonious sign of the Mordaunt Estate, "For Rental to Suitable
+Tenant," invited inspection. "Suitable" is the catch in that
+innocent-appearing legend. For the Mordaunt Estate, which is no estate
+at all and never has been, but an ex-butcher of elegant proclivities
+named Wagboom, prefers to rent its properties on a basis of prejudice
+rather than profit, and is quite capable of rejecting an applicant as
+unsuitable on purely eclectic grounds, such as garlic for breakfast, or
+a glass eye.
+
+How the new tenant had contrived to commend himself to Mr.
+Mordaunt-Wagboom is something of a mystery. Probably it was his name
+rather than his appearance, which was shiny, not to say seedy. He
+encountered the Estate when that incorporated gentleman was engaged in
+painting the front door, and, in a deprecating voice, inquired whether
+twenty-five dollars a month would be considered.
+
+"Maybe," returned the Estate, whereupon the stranger introduced himself,
+with a stiff little bow, as Mr. Winslow Merivale.
+
+Mr. Wagboom was favorably impressed with this, as possessing
+aristocratic implications.
+
+"The name," he pronounced, "is satisfactory. The sum is satisfactory. It
+is, however, essential that the lessor should measure up in character
+and status to the standards of the Mordaunt Estate." This he had adapted
+from the prospectus of a correspondence school, which had come to him
+through the mail, very genteelly worded. "Family man?" he added briskly.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"How many of you?"
+
+"Two."
+
+"Wife?"
+
+"No, sir," said the little man, very low.
+
+"Son? Daughter? What age?"
+
+"I have never been blessed with a child."
+
+"Then who--"
+
+"Willy Woolly would share the house with me, sir."
+
+For the first time the Mordaunt Estate noticed a small, fluffy poodle,
+with an important expression, seated behind the railing.
+
+"I don't like dogs," said the Mordaunt Estate curtly.
+
+"Willy Woolly"--Mr. Winslow Merivale addressed his companion--"this
+gentleman does not like dogs."
+
+The Mordaunt Estate felt suddenly convicted of social error. The feeling
+deepened when Willy Woolly advanced, reckoned him up with an appraising
+eye, and, without the slightest loss of dignity, raised himself on his
+hind legs, offering the gesture of supplication. He did not, however,
+droop his paws in the accepted canine style; he joined them, finger tip
+to finger tip, elegantly and piously, after the manner of the
+Maiden's Prayer.
+
+The Estate promptly capitulated.
+
+"Some pup!" he exclaimed. "When did you want to move in?"
+
+"At once, if you please."
+
+Before the Estate had finished his artistic improvements on the front
+door, the new tenant had begun the transfer of his simple lares and
+penates in a big hand-propelled pushcart. The initial load consisted in
+the usual implements of eating, sitting, and sleeping. But the burden of
+the half-dozen succeeding trips was homogeneous. Clocks. Big clocks,
+little clocks, old clocks, new clocks, fat clocks, lean clocks, solemn
+clocks, fussy clocks, clocks of red, of green, of brown, of pink, of
+white, of orange, of blue, clocks that sang, and clocks that rang,
+clocks that whistled, and blared, and piped, and drummed. One by one,
+the owner established them in their new domicile, adjusted them, dusted
+them, and wound them, and, as they set themselves once more to their
+meticulous busy-ness, that place which had for so long been muffled in
+quiet and deadened with dust, gave forth the tiny bustle of unresting
+mechanism and the pleasant chime of the hours. Number 37 became the
+House of Silvery Voices.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus came to Our Square, to be one of us, for better or for worse, Mr.
+Winslow Merivale, promptly rechristened Stepfather Time. The Bonnie
+Lassie gave him the name. She said that only a stepfather could bring up
+his charges so badly. For his clocks were both independent and
+irresponsible, though through no fault of their own. When they were
+wound they went. When they were unwound they rested. Seldom were more
+than half of them simultaneously busy, and their differences of opinion
+as to the hour were radical and irreconcilable. The big, emphatic
+eight-day, opposite the front door, might proclaim that it was eleven,
+only to be at once contradicted by the little tinkler on the parlor
+mantel, which announced that it was six, thereby starting up the
+cathedral case on the stairway and the Grandfather in the dining-room,
+who held out respectively for eight and two, while all the time it was
+really half-past one. Thence arose in the early days painful
+misunderstandings on the part of Our Square, for we are a simple people
+and deem it the duty of a timepiece to keep time. In particular we were
+befooled by Grandfather, the solemn-voiced Ananias of a clock with a
+long-range stroke and a most convincing manner. So that Schepstein, the
+note-shaver, on his way to a profitable appointment at 11 A.M., heard
+the hour strike (thirty-five minutes in advance of the best professional
+opinion) from the House of Silvery Voices, and was impelled to the
+recklessness of hiring a passing taxi, thereby reaching his destination
+with half an hour to spare and half a dollar to lack, for which latter
+he threatened to sue the Mordaunt Estate's tenant. To the credit side of
+the house's account it must be set down that MacLachan, the tailor,
+having started one of his disastrous drunks within the precincts of his
+Home of Fashion, was on his way to finish it in the gutter via the
+zigzag route from corner saloon to corner saloon, when the Twelve
+Apostles clock in the basement window lifted up its voice and
+(presumably through the influence of Peter) thrice denied the hour,
+which was actually a quarter before midnight. "Losh!" said MacLachan,
+who invariably reacted in tongue to the stimulus of Scotch whiskey,
+"they'll a' be closed. Hame an' to bed wi' ye, waster of the priceless
+hours!" And back he staggered to sleep it off.
+
+Then there was the disastrous case of the Little Red Doctor, who set out
+to attend a highly interesting consultation at 4 P.M. and, hearing
+Grandfather Ananias strike three, erroneously concluded that he had
+spare time to stop in for a peek at Madame Tallafferr's gout (which was
+really vanity in the guise of tight shoes), and reached the hospital,
+only to find it all over and the patient dead.
+
+"It's an outrage," declared the Little Red Doctor fiercely, "that an old
+lunatic can move in here from God-knows-where in a pushcart and play
+merry hell with a hard-working practitioner's professional duties. And
+you're the one to tell him so, Dominie. You're the diplomat of
+the Square."
+
+He even inveigled the Bonnie Lassie into backing him up in this
+preposterous proposal. She had her own grievance against the House of
+Silvery Voices.
+
+"It isn't the way it plays tricks on time alone," said she. "There's one
+clock in there that's worse than conscience."
+
+And she brought her indictment against a raucous timepiece which was
+wont to lead up to its striking with a long, preliminary
+clack-and-whirr, alleging that twice, when she had quit her sculping
+early because the clay was obdurate and wouldn't come right, and had
+gone for a walk to clear her vision, the clock had accosted her in these
+unjustifiable terms:
+
+"Clacketty-whirr-rr-rr! Back-to-yer-worr-rr-rrk! Yerr-rr-rr-rr _wrong!
+wrong! wrong! wrong!"_
+
+"Wherefore," said the Bonnie Lassie, "your appellant prays that you be a
+dear, good, stern, forbidding Dominie and go over to Number 37 and ask
+him what he means by it, anyway, and tell him he's got to stop it."
+
+Now, the Bonnie Lassie holds the power of the high, the middle, and the
+low justice over all Our Square by the divine right of loveliness and
+kindliness. So that evening I went while the Little Red Doctor, as a
+self-constituted Committee in Waiting, sat on my bench. Stepfather Time
+himself opened the door to me.
+
+"What might they call you, sir, if I may ask?" he inquired with timid
+courtesy.
+
+"They might call me the Dominie hereabouts. And they do."
+
+"I have heard of you." He motioned me to a seat in the bare little room,
+alive with tickings and clickings. "You have lived long here, sir?"
+
+"Long."
+
+From some interminable distance a voice of time mocked me with a subtle
+and solemn mockery: "_Long. Long. Long_."
+
+My host waited for the clock to finish before he spoke again. As I
+afterward discovered, this was his invariable custom.
+
+"I, too, am an old man," he murmured.
+
+"A hardy sixty, I should guess."
+
+"A long life. Might I ask you a question, sir,' as to the folk in this
+Square?" He hesitated a moment after I had nodded. "Are they, as one
+might say, friendly? Neighborly?"
+
+I was a little taken aback. "We are not an intrusive people."
+
+"No one," he said, "has been to see my clocks."
+
+I began to perceive that this was a sad little man, and to mislike my
+errand. "You live here quite alone?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, no!" said he quickly. "You see, I have Willy Woolly. Pardon me. I
+have not yet presented him."
+
+At his call the fluffy poodle ambled over to me, sniffed at my extended
+hand, and, rearing, set his paws on my knee.
+
+"He greets you as a friend," said my new acquaintance in a tone which
+indicated that I had been signally honored. "I trust that we shall see
+you here often, Mr. Dominie. Would you like to inspect my
+collection now?"
+
+Here was my opening. "The fact is--" I began, and stopped from sheer
+cowardice. The job was too distasteful. To wound that gentle pride in
+his possessions which was obviously the life of the singular being
+before me--I couldn't do it. "The fact is," I repeated, "I--I have a
+friend outside waiting for me. The Little Red Doctor--er--Dr. Smith,
+you know."
+
+"A physician?" he said eagerly. "Would he come in, do you think? Willy
+Woolly has been quite feverish to-day."
+
+"I'll ask him," I replied, and escaped with that excuse.
+
+When I broke it to the Little Red Doctor, the mildest thing he said to
+me was to ask me why I should take him for a dash-binged vet!
+
+Appeals to his curiosity finally overpersuaded him, and now it was my
+turn to wait on the bench while he invaded the realm of the Voices.
+Happily for me the weather was amiable; it was nearly two hours before
+my substitute reappeared. He then tried to sneak away without seeing me.
+Balked in this cowardly endeavor, he put on a vague professional
+expression and observed that it was an obscure case.
+
+"For a man of sixty," I began, "Mr. Merivale--"
+
+"_Who_?" interrupted the Little Red Doctor; "I'm speaking of the dog."
+
+"Have you, then," I inquired in insinuating accents, "become a
+dash-binged vet?"
+
+"A man can't be a brute, can he!" he retorted angrily. "When that
+animated mop put up his paws and stuck his tongue out like a child--"
+
+"I know," I said. "You took on a new patient. Probably gratis," I added,
+with malice, for this was one of the Little Red Doctor's notoriously
+weak points.
+
+"Just the same, he's a fool dog."
+
+"On the contrary, he is a person of commanding intellect and nice social
+discrimination," I asserted, recalling Willy Woolly's flattering
+acceptance of myself.
+
+"A faker," asseverated my friend. "He pretends to see things."
+
+I sat up straight on my bench. "Things? What kind of things?"
+
+"Things that aren't there," returned the Little Red Doctor, and fell to
+musing. "They couldn't be," he added presently and argumentatively.
+
+Receiving no encouragement when I sought further details, I asked
+whether he had called the new resident to account for the delinquencies
+of his clocks. He shook his head.
+
+"I didn't have time," said he doggedly.
+
+"Time? Why, there's nothing but time in that house."
+
+The Little Red Doctor chose to take my feeble joke at par. "No time at
+all. None of the clocks keep it."
+
+"How does he manage his life, then?"
+
+"Willy Woolly does that for him. Barks him up in the morning. Jogs his
+elbow at mealtimes. Tucks him in bed at night, for all I know."
+
+Thus abortively ended Our Square's protest against Stepfather Time and
+his House of Silvery Voices. The Little Red Doctor's obscure suggestion
+stuck in my mind, and a few nights later I made a second call. Curiosity
+rather than neighborliness was the inciting cause. Therefore I ought to
+have been embarrassed at the quiet warmth of my reception by both of the
+tenants. Interrupting himself in the work of adjusting a new
+acquisition's mechanism, Stepfather Time settled me into the most
+comfortable chair and immediately began to talk of clocks.
+
+Good talk, it was; quaint and flavorous and erudite. But my attention
+kept wandering to Willy Woolly, who, after politely kissing my hand, had
+settled down behind his master's chair. Willy Woolly was seeing things.
+No pretense about it. His mournful eyes yearned hither and thither,
+following some entity that moved in the room, dimmer than darkness, more
+ethereal than shadow. His ears quivered. A muffled, measured thumping
+sounded, dull and indeterminate like spirit rapping; it took me an
+appreciable time to identify it as the noise of the poodle's tail,
+beating the floor. Once he whined, a quick, quivering, eager note. And
+still the amateur of clocks murmured his placid lore. It was rather more
+than old nerves could stand.
+
+"The dog," I broke in upon the stream of erudition. "Surely, Mr.
+Merivale--"
+
+"Willy Woolly?" He looked down, and the faithful one withdrew himself
+from his vision long enough to lick the master hand. "Does he
+disturb you?"
+
+"Oh, no," I answered, a little confused. "I only thought--it seemed that
+he is uneasy about something."
+
+"There are finer sensibilities than we poor humans have," said my host
+gravely.
+
+"Then you have noticed how he watches and follows?"
+
+"He is always like that. Always, since."
+
+His "since" was one of the strangest syllables that ever came to my
+ears. It implied nothing to follow. It was finality's self.
+
+"It is"--I sought a word--"interesting and curious," I concluded lamely,
+feeling how insufficient the word was.
+
+"She comes back to him," said my host simply.
+
+No need to ask of whom he spoke. The pronoun was as final and definitive
+as his "since." Never have I heard such tenderness as he gave to its
+utterance. Nor such desolation as dimmed his voice when he added:
+
+"She never comes back to me."
+
+That evening he spoke no more of her. Yet I felt that I had been
+admitted to an intimacy. And, as the habit grew upon me thereafter of
+dropping in to listen to the remote, restful, unworldly quaintnesses of
+his philosophy, fragments, dropped here and there, built up the outline
+of the tragedy which had left him stranded in our little backwater of
+quiet. She whom he had cherished since they were boy and girl together,
+had died in the previous winter. She had formed the whole circle of his
+existence within which he moved, attended by Willy Woolly, happily
+gathering his troves. Her death had left him not so much alone as alien
+in the world. He was without companionship except that of Willy Woolly,
+without interest except that of his timepieces, and without hope except
+that of rejoining her. Once he emerged from a long spell of musing, to
+say in a tone of indescribable conviction:
+
+"I suppose I was the happiest man in the world."
+
+Any chance incident or remark might turn his thought and speech,
+unconscious of the transition, from his favorite technicalities back to
+the past. Some comment of mine upon a specimen of that dismal songster,
+the cuckoo clock, which stood on his mantel, had started him into one of
+his learned expositions.
+
+"The first cuckoo clock, as you are doubtless aware, sir"--he was always
+scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how
+abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent
+courtesy--"was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird.
+It had a double pipe for the hours, 'Pit-weep! Pit-weep!' and
+a single--"
+
+His voice trailed into silence as the mechanical bird of his own
+collection popped forth and piped its wooden lay. Willy Woolly pattered
+over, sat down before it, and, gazing through and beyond the meaningless
+face with eyes of adoration whose purport there was no mistaking,
+whined lovingly.
+
+"When the cuckoo sounded," continued the collector without the slightest
+change of intonation, "she used to imitate it to puzzle Willy Woolly. A
+merry heart! ... All was so still after it stopped beating. The clocks
+forgot to strike."
+
+The poodle, turning his absorbed regard from the Presence that moves
+beyond time and its perishing voices, trotted to his master and nuzzled
+the frail hand.
+
+The hand fondled him. "Yes, little dog," murmured the man. His eyes, sad
+as those of the animal, quested the dimness.
+
+"Why does she come to him and not to me? He loved her dearly, didn't
+you, little dog? But not as I did." There was a quivering note of
+jealousy in his voice. "Why is my vision blinded to what he sees?"
+
+"You have said yourself that there are finer sensibilities than ours," I
+suggested.
+
+He shook his head. "It lies deeper than that. I think he is drawing near
+her. He used to have a little bark that he kept for her alone. In the
+dead of night I have heard him give that bark--since. And I knew that
+she was speaking to him. I think that he will go first. Perhaps he will
+tell her that I am coming.... But I should be very lonely."
+
+"Willy's a stout young thing," I asserted, "with years of life before
+him."
+
+"Perhaps," he returned doubtfully. A gleam of rare fun lit up his pale,
+vague eyes. "Can't you see him dodging past Saint Peter through the
+pearly gates" ("I was brought up a Methodist," he added in apologetic
+explanation), "trotting along the alabaster streets sniffing about for
+her among all the Shining Ones, listening for her voice amid the sound
+of the harps, and when he finds her, hallelujahing with that little bark
+that was for her alone: 'Here I am, mistress! Here I am! And _he's_
+coming soon, mistress. Your Old Boy is coming soon.'"
+
+When I retailed that conversation to the Little Red Doctor, he snorted
+and said that Stepfather Time was one degree crazier than Willy Woolly
+and that I wasn't much better than a higher moron myself. Well, if I've
+got to be called a fool by my best friends, I'd rather be called it in
+Greek than in English. It's more euphonious.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pair in Number 37 soon settled down to a routine life. Every morning
+Stepfather Time got out his big pushcart and set forth in search of
+treasure, accompanied by Willy Woolly. Sometimes the dog trotted beneath
+the cart; sometimes he rode in it. He was always on the job. Never did
+he indulge in those divagations so dear to the normal canine heart.
+Other dogs and their ways interested him not. Cats simply did not exist
+in his circumscribed life. Even to the shining mark of a boy on a
+bicycle he was indifferent, and when a dog has reached that stage one
+may safely say of him that he has renounced the world and all its
+vanities. Willy Woolly's one concern in life was his master and their
+joint business.
+
+Soon they became accepted familiars of Our Square. Despite the general
+conviction that they were slightly touched, we even became proud of
+them. They lent distinction to the locality by getting written up in a
+Sunday supplement, Willy Woolly being specially photographed therefor, a
+gleam of transient glory, which, however it may have gratified our local
+pride, left both of the subjects quite indifferent. Stepfather Time
+might have paid more heed to it had he not, at the time, been wholly
+preoccupied in a difficult quest.
+
+In a basement window, far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered
+timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen
+the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to
+negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man
+with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the
+connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his
+quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime
+which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of all,
+harmonic combinations of the clock bells.) Every day he would halt in
+front of the place and wait to hear it strike, and its owner would peer
+out from behind it and shake a wasted fist and curse him with strange,
+hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and
+urged him to pass on from that unchancy spot. All that he could learn
+about the basement dweller was that his name was Lukisch and he owed
+for his rent.
+
+Mr. Lukisch had nothing special against the queer old party who made
+sheep's eyes at his clock every day. He hated him quite impartially, as
+he hated everybody. Mr. Lukisch had a bad heart in more senses than one,
+and a grudge against the world which he blamed for the badness of his
+heart. Also he had definite ideas of reprisal, which were focused by a
+dispossess notice, and directed particularly upon the person and
+property of his landlord. The clock he needed as the instrument of his
+vengeance; therefore he would not have sold it at any price to the
+sheep-eyed old lunatic of the pushcart, who now, on the eve of his
+eviction, stood gazing in with wistful contemplation. Presently he
+passed on and Mr. Lukisch resumed his tinkering with the clock's
+insides. He was very delicate and careful about it, for these were the
+final touches, preparatory to his leaving the timepiece as a memento
+when he should quietly depart that evening, shortly before nine. What
+might happen after nine, or, rather, on the stroke of nine, was no worry
+of his, though it might be and probably would be of the landlord's,
+provided that heartless extortioner survived it.
+
+Having completed his operations, Mr. Lukisch sat down in a rickety chair
+and gazed at the clock, face to face, with contemplative satisfaction.
+Stepfather Time would have been interested in the contrast between those
+two physiognomies. The clock's face, benign and bland, would have
+deceived him. But, innocent though he was in the ways of evil, the man's
+face might have warned him.
+
+Something within the clock's mechanism clicked and checked and went on
+again. The sound, quite unexpected, gave Mr. Lukisch a bad start. Could
+something have gone wrong with the combination? Suppose a premature
+release.... At that panic thought something within Mr. Lukisch's bad
+heart clicked and checked and did not go on again. The fear in his eyes
+faded and was succeeded by an expression of surprise and inquiry.
+Whether the inquiry was answered, nobody could have guessed from the
+still, unwinking regard on the face of the victim of heart failure.
+
+By and by a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, drawn by that mysterious
+instinct for sensation which attracts the casual and the idle. Two bold
+spirits entered the door and stood, hesitant, just inside, awed because
+the clock seemed so startlingly alive in that place. Some one sent
+upstairs for the landlord, who arrived to bemoan the unjust fates which
+had not only mulcted him of two months' rent with nothing to show for it
+but a rickety clock, but had also saddled him with a wholly superfluous
+corpse. He abused both indiscriminately, but chiefly the clock because
+it gave the effect of being sentient. So fervently did he curse it that
+Stepfather Time, repassing with Willy Woolly, heard him and entered.
+
+"And who"--the landlord addressed high Heaven with a gesture at once
+pious and pessimistic--"is to pay me fourteen dollars back rent this
+dirty beggar owes?"
+
+"The man," said Stepfather Time gently, "is dead."
+
+"He is." The landlord confirmed the unwelcome fact with objurgations.
+"Now must come the po-liss, the coroner, trouble, and expense. And what
+have I who run my property honest and respectable got to pay for it?
+Some rags and a bum clock."
+
+Willy Woolly sniffed at one protruding foot and growled. Dead or alive,
+this was not Willy Woolly's kind of man. "Now, now, Willy Woolly!"
+reproved his master. "Who are we that we should judge him?"
+
+"But I don't _like_ him," declared Willy Woolly in unequivocal dog
+language.
+
+"I think from his face that he has suffered much," said the gentle
+collector, wise in human pain.
+
+"Me; I suppose I don't suffer!" pointed out the landlord vehemently.
+"Fourteen dollars out. Two months' rent. A bum clock."
+
+He kicked the shabby case which whizzed and birred and struck five. The
+voice of its bell, measured and mellow and pure, was unquestionably D
+in alt.
+
+"My dear sir," said Stepfather Time urbanely, but quivering underneath
+his calm manner with the hot eagerness of the chase, "I will buy
+your clock."
+
+A gust of rough laughter passed through the crowd. The injurious word
+"nut" floated in the air, and was followed by "Verrichter." The landlord
+took thought and hope.
+
+"It is a very fine clock," he declared.
+
+"It is a bum clock," Stepfather Time reminded him mildly.
+
+"Stepnadel, the auctioneer, would pay me much money for it."
+
+"I will pay you much money for it."
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Seven dollars. That is one month's rent that he owed."
+
+"Two months' rent I must have."
+
+"One," said Stepfather Time firmly.
+
+"Two," said the landlord insistently.
+
+"Urff! Grr--rr--rr--rrff!" said Willy Woolly in emphatic dissuasion.
+
+Stepfather Time was scandalized. Expert opinion was quite outside of
+Willy Woolly's province. Only once in the course of their years together
+had he interfered in a purchase. Justice compelled Stepfather Time to
+recall that the subject of Willy's protests on that occasion had
+subsequently turned out to be far less antique than the worm holes in
+the woodwork (artificially blown in with powder) would have led the
+unsuspecting to suppose. But about the present legacy there could be no
+such question. It was genuine. It was old. It was valuable. It possessed
+a seraphic note pitched true to the long-desired chord.
+
+Extracting a ten-dollar note from his wallet, Stepfather Time waved it
+beneath the landlord's wrinkled and covetous nose. The landlord
+capitulated. Willy Woolly, sniffing at the clock with fur abristle,
+lifted up his voice and wailed. Perhaps his delicate nose had already
+detected the faint, unhallowed odor of the chemicals within. He
+stubbornly refused to ride back in the cart with the new acquisition,
+and was accused of being sulky and childish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The relic of the late unlamented Lukisch was temporarily installed in a
+high chair before the open window giving on the areaway of Number 37.
+There it briefly beamed upon the busy life of Our Square with its bland
+and hypocritical face, and there, thrice and no more, it sounded the
+passing of the hours with its sweet and false voice, biding the stroke
+of nine. Meantime Willy Woolly settled down to keep watch on it and
+could not be moved from that duty. Every time it struck the half he
+growled. At the hour he barked and raged. When Stepfather Time sought to
+draw him away to dinner he committed the unpardonable sin of dog-dom, he
+snarled at his master. Turning this strange manifestation over in his
+troubled mind, the collector decided that Willy Woolly must be ill, and
+therefore that evening went to seek the Little Red Doctor and
+his wisdom.
+
+Together they came across the park space opposite the House of Silvery
+Voices in time to witness the final scene.
+
+The new clock struck the half after eight as they reached the turn in
+the path. A long, quavering howl, mingled of rage and desperation,
+answered in Willy Woolly's voice.
+
+"You hear?" said Stepfather Time anxiously to the Little Red Doctor.
+"The dog is not himself."
+
+They saw him rear up against the clock case. He seemed to be trying to
+tear it open with his teeth.
+
+"Willy!" cried his master in a tone such as, I suppose, the well-loved
+companion had not heard twice before in his life. "Down, Willy!"
+
+The dog drooped back. But it was not in obedience. For once he
+disregarded the master's command. Perhaps he did not even hear it in the
+absorption of his dread and rage. Step by step he withdrew, then rushed
+and launched himself straight at the timepiece. Slight though his bulk
+was, the impetus of the charge did the work. The clock reeled, toppled,
+and fell outward through the window; then--
+
+From the House of Silvery Voices rose a roar that smote the heavens. A
+roar and a belch of flame and a spreading, poisonous stench that struck
+the two men in the park to earth. When they struggled to their feet
+again, the smoke had parted and the House of Silvery Voices gaped open,
+its front wall stripped bodily away. But within, the sound of the busy
+industry of time went on uninterrupted.
+
+Weaving and wobbling on his feet, Stepfather Time staggered toward the
+pot calling on the name of Willy Woolly. At the gate he stopped, put
+forth his hand, and lifted from the railing a wopsy, woolly fragment, no
+bigger than a sheet of note paper. It was red and warm and wet.
+
+"He's gone," said Stepfather Time.
+
+The Clock of Conscience took up the tale. "Gone. Gone. Gone," it pealed.
+
+As the collector would not leave the shattered house, they sent for me
+to stay the night with him. A strange vigil! For now it was the man who
+followed with intent, unworldly eyes that which I, with my lesser
+vision, could not discern. And the Unseen moved swiftly about the
+desolate room, low to the floor, and seemed finally to stop, motionless
+beneath a caressing hand. I thought to hear that dull, measured thumping
+of a grateful tail, but it was only the Twelve Apostles getting ready
+to strike.
+
+Only once that night did Stepfather Time speak, and then not to me.
+
+"Tell her," he said in an assured murmur, "that I shan't be long."
+
+"Not-long. Not-long. Not-long. Not-long. Not-long," confirmed
+Grandfather from his stance on the stairway.
+
+In that assurance Stepfather Time fell asleep. He did not go out again
+with his pushcart, but sat in the rear room while the Mordaunt Estate in
+person superintended the job of putting a new front on the house.
+
+The night after it was finished I received an urgent telephone call to
+come there at once. At the entrance I met the Little Red Doctor
+coming out.
+
+"The clocks have stopped," said he gently.
+
+So I turned to cross the park with him.
+
+"I shall certify," said he, "heart disease."
+
+"You may certify what you please," said I. "But what do you believe?"
+
+The Little Red Doctor, who prides himself on being a hard-bitted
+materialist, glared at me as injuriously as if my innocent question had
+been an insult.
+
+"I don't believe it!" he averred violently. "Do you take me for a
+sentimental idiot that I should pin silly labels on my old friend,
+Death?" His expression underwent a curious change. "But I never saw such
+joy on any living face," he muttered under his breath.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The House of Silvery Voices is silent now. But its echo still lives and
+makes music in Our Square. For, with the proceeds of Stepfather Time's
+clocks, an astounding total, we have built a miniature clock tower
+facing Number 37, with a silvery voice of its own, for memory. The
+Bonnie Lassie designed the tower, and because there is love and
+understanding in all that the Bonnie Lassie sets her wonder-working hand
+to, it is as beautiful as it is simple. Among ourselves we call it the
+Tower of the Two Faithful Hearts.
+
+The silvery voice within it is the product of a paragon among
+timepieces, a most superior instrument, of unimpeachable construction
+and great cost. But it has one invincible peculiarity, the despair of
+the best consulting experts who have been called in to remedy it and,
+one and all, have failed for reasons which they cannot fathom. How
+should they!
+
+It never keeps time.
+
+
+
+HOME-SEEKERS' GOAL
+
+Long ago I made an important discovery. It comes under the general head
+of statics and is this: by occupying an invariable bench in Our Square,
+looking venerable and contemplative and indigenous, as if you had grown
+up in that selfsame spot, you will draw people to come to you for
+information, and they will frequently give more than they get of it.
+Such, I am informed, is the method whereby the flytrap orchid achieves a
+satisfying meal. Not that I seek to claim for myself the colorful
+splendors of the Cypripedium, being only a tired old pedagogue with a
+taste for the sunlight and for observing the human bubbles that float
+and bob on the current in our remote eddy of life. Nevertheless, I can
+follow a worthy example, even though the exemplar be only a carnivorous
+bloom. And, I may confess, on the afternoon of October 1st, I was in a
+receptive mood for such flies of information as might come to me
+concerning two large invading vans which had rumbled into our quiet
+precincts and, after a pause for inquiry, stopped before the Mordaunt
+Estate's newly repaired property at Number 37.
+
+The Mordaunt Estate in person was painting the front wall. The design
+which he practiced was based less upon any previsioned concept of art
+than upon the purchase, at a price, of a rainbow-end job lot of colors.
+
+The vanners descended, bent on negotiations. Progress was obviously
+unsatisfactory, the artist, after brief and chill consideration,
+reverting to his toil. Now, tact and discretion are essential in
+approaching the Mordaunt Estate, for he is a prickly institution. I was
+sure that the newcomers had taken the wrong tack with him.
+
+Discomfiture was in their mien as they withdrew in my direction. I mused
+upon my bench, with a metaphysical expression which I have found useful
+in such cases. They conferred. They approached. They begged my pardon.
+With an effort which can hardly have failed to be effective, I dragged
+myself back to the world of actualities and opened languid eyes upon
+them. It is possible that I opened them somewhat wider than the normal,
+for they fell at once upon the nearer and smaller of the pair, a
+butterfly of the most vivid and delightful appearance.
+
+"Is the house with the 'To Let' sign on it really to let, do you know,
+sir?" she inquired, adding music to color with her voice.
+
+"So I understand," said I, rising.
+
+"And the party with the yellow nose, who is desecrating the front," put
+in the butterfly's companion. "Is he a lunatic or a designer of
+barber poles?"
+
+"He is a proud and reserved ex-butcher, named Wagboom, now doing a
+limited but high-class business in rentals as the Mordaunt Estate."
+
+"He may be the butcher, but he talks more like the pig. All we could get
+out of him was a series of grunts when we addressed him by name."
+
+"Ah, but you used the wrong name. For all business purposes he should be
+addressed as the Mordaunt Estate, his duly incorporated title. Wagboom
+is an irritant to a haughty property-owner's soul."
+
+"Shall we go back and try a counter-irritant?" asked the young man of
+his companion.
+
+"With a view to renting?" I inquired.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you keep dogs?"
+
+"No," said the young man.
+
+"Or clocks by the hundred?"
+
+"Certainly not," answered the butterfly.
+
+"Or bombs?"
+
+Upon their combined and emphatic negative they looked at each other with
+a wild surmise which said plainly: "Are they _all_ crazy down here?"
+
+"If you do," I explained kindly, "you might have trouble in dealing. The
+latest tenant of Number 37 was a fluffy poodle who pushed one of two
+hundred clocks into the front area so that it exploded and blew away the
+front wall." And I outlined the history of that canine clairvoyant,
+Willy Woolly. "The Mordaunt Estate is sensitive about his tenants,
+anyway. He rents, not on profits, but on prejudice. Perhaps it would be
+well for you to flatter him a little; admire his style of house
+painting."
+
+Accepting this counsel with suitable expressions, they returned to the
+charge, addressed the proprietor of Number 37 by his official title and
+delivered the most gratifying opinions regarding his artistry.
+
+"That," said the Mordaunt Estate, wiping his painty hands on his knees
+with brilliant results, as he turned a fat and smiling face to them, "is
+after the R. Noovo style. I dunno who R. Noovo was, but he's a bear for
+color. Are you artists?"
+
+"We're house-hunters," explained the young man.
+
+"As for tenants," said the Mordaunt Estate, "I take 'em or leave 'em as
+I like 'em or don't. I like you folks. You got an eye for a tasty bit of
+colorin'. Eight rooms, bath, and kitchen. By the week in case we don't
+suit each other. Very choice and classy for a young married couple.
+Eight dollars, in advance. Prices for R. Noovo dwellings has riz."
+
+"We're not married," said the young man.
+
+"Hey? Whaddye mean, not married?" demanded that highly respectable
+institution, the Mordaunt Estate, severely. His expression mollified as
+he turned to the butterfly. "Aimin' to be, I s'pose."
+
+"We only met this morning; so we haven't decided yet," answered the
+young man. "At least," he added blandly, as his companion seemed to be
+struggling for utterance, "she hasn't informed me of her decision, if
+she has made it."
+
+Bewilderment spread like a gray mist across the painty features of the
+Mordaunt Estate. "Nothin' doin'," he began, "until--"
+
+"Don't decide hastily," adjured the young man. "Take this coin." He
+forced a half-dollar into the reluctant hand of the decorator.
+
+"Nothin' doin' on account, either. Pay as you enter."
+
+"Only one of us is going to enter. The coin decides. Spin it. Your
+call," he said to the butterfly.
+
+"Heads," cried the butterfly.
+
+"Tails," proclaimed the arbiter, as the silver shivered into silence on
+the flagging.
+
+"Then the house is yours," said the butterfly. "Good luck go with it."
+She smiled, gamely covering her disappointment.
+
+"I don't want it," returned the young man.
+
+"Play fair," she exhorted him. "We both agreed solemnly to stand by the
+toss. Didn't we?"
+
+"What did we agree?"
+
+"That the winner should have the choice."
+
+"Very well. I won, didn't I?"
+
+"You certainly did."
+
+"And I choose not to take the house," he declared triumphantly. "It's a
+very nice house, but"--he shaded his eyes as he directed them upon the
+proud-pied façade, blinking significantly--"I'd have to wear smoked
+glasses if I lived in it, and they don't suit my style of beauty."
+
+"You'd not get it now, young feller, if you was to go down on your knees
+with a thousand dollars in each hand," asserted the offended Estate.
+
+"See!" said the young man to the butterfly. "Fate decides for you."
+
+"But what will you do?" she asked solicitously.
+
+"Perhaps I can find some other place in the Square."
+
+She held out her hand. "You've been very nice and helpful, but--I think
+not. Good-bye."
+
+He regarded the hand blankly. "Not--what?"
+
+"Not here in this Square, if you don't mind."
+
+"But where else is there?" he asked piteously. "You know yourself there
+are countless thousands of homeless drifters floating around on this
+teeming island in vans, with no place to land."
+
+"Try Jersey. Or Brooklyn," was her hopeful suggestion.
+
+
+  "'And bade betwixt their shores to be
+  The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea,'"
+
+
+he quoted with dramatic intonation, adding helpfully: "Matthew Arnold.
+Or is it Arnold Bennett? Anyway, think how far away those places are,"
+he pleaded. "From you!" he concluded.
+
+A little decided frown crept between her eyebrows. "I've accepted you as
+a gentleman on trust," she began, when he broke in:
+
+"Don't do it. It's a fearfully depressing thing to be reminded that
+you're a gentleman on trust and expected to live up to it. Think how it
+cramps one's style, not to mention limiting one's choice of real estate.
+A gentleman may stake his future happiness and his hope of a home on the
+toss of a coin, but he mustn't presume to want to see the other party to
+the gamble again, even if she's the only thing in the whole sweep of his
+horizon worth seeing. Is that fair? Where is Eternal Justice, I ask you,
+when such things--"
+
+"Oh, do stop!" she implored. "I don't think you're sane."
+
+"No such claim is put forth on behalf of the accused. He confesses to
+complete loss of mental equilibrium since--let me see--since 11.15 A.M."
+
+Here the Mordaunt Estate, who had been doing some shrewd thinking on his
+own behalf, interposed.
+
+"I'd rather rent to two than one," he said insinuatingly. "More reliable
+and steady with the rent. Settin' aside the young feller's weak eyes,
+you're a nice-matched pair. Gittin' a license is easy, if you know the
+ropes. I'd even be glad to go with you to--"
+
+"As to not being married," broke in the butterfly, with the light of a
+great resolve in her eye, "this gentleman may speak for himself. I am."
+
+"Am what?" queried the Estate.
+
+"Married."
+
+"Damn!" exploded the young man. "I mean, congratulations and all that
+sort of thing. I--I'm really awfully sorry. You'll forgive my making
+such an ass of myself, won't you?"
+
+To her troubled surprise there was real pain in the eyes which he turned
+rather helplessly away from her. Had she kept her own gaze fixed on
+them, she would have experienced a second surprise a moment later, at a
+sudden alteration and hardening of their expression. For his groping
+regard had fallen upon her left hand, which was gloved. Now, a wedding
+ring may be put on and off at will, but the glove, beneath which it has
+been once worn, never thereafter quite regains the maidenly smoothness
+of the third finger. The butterfly's gloves were not new, yet there
+showed not the faintest trace of a ridge in the significant locality.
+While admitting to himself that the evidence fell short of
+conclusiveness, the young man decided to accept it as a working theory
+and to act, win or lose, do or die, upon the hopeful hypothesis that his
+delightful but elusive companion was a li--that is to say, an inventor.
+He would give that invention the run of its young life!
+
+"We--ell," the Mordaunt Estate was saying, "that's too bad. Ain't a
+widdah lady are you?"
+
+"My husband is in France."
+
+With a prayer that his theory was correct, the young man rushed in where
+many an angel might have feared to tread. "Maybe he'll stay there,"
+he surmised.
+
+"What!"
+
+In a musical but unappreciated barytone he hummed the initial line of
+"The Girl I Left Behind Me."
+
+  "'The maids of France are fond and free.'
+
+"Besides," he added, "it's quite unhealthy there at this season. I
+wouldn't be surprised"--he halted--"at anything," he finished darkly.
+
+Outraged by this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally
+hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she
+could find them--
+
+"I'll wait around--in hopes," he decided calmly.
+
+So, that was the attitude this ruffian took with a respectable and
+ostensibly married woman! And she had mistaken him for a gentleman! She
+had even begun to feel a reluctant sort of liking for him; at any rate,
+an interest in his ambiguous and perplexing personality. Now--how dared
+he! She put it to him at once: "How dare you!"
+
+"Flashing eye, stamp of the foot, hands outstretched in gesture of
+loathing and repulsion; villain registers shame and remorse," prescribed
+the unimpressed subject of her retort. "As a wife, you are, of course,
+unapproachable. As a widow, grass-green, crepe-black, or only
+prospective"--he suddenly assumed a posture made familiar through the
+public prints by a widely self-exploited savior of the suffering--"there
+is H-O-P-E!" he intoned solemnly, wagging a benignant forefinger at her.
+
+The butterfly struggled with an agonizing desire to break down into
+unbridled mirth and confess. Pride restrained her; pride mingled with
+foreboding as to what this exceedingly progressive and by no means
+unattractive young suitor--for he could be relegated to no lesser
+category--might do next. She said coolly and crisply:
+
+"I wish nothing more to do with you whatever."
+
+"Then I needn't quit the Garden of Ed--I mean, Our Square?"
+
+"You may do as you see fit," she replied loftily.
+
+"Act the gent, can't chuh?" reproved the Mordaunt Estate. "You're makin'
+the lady cry."
+
+"He isn't," denied the lady, with ferocity. "He couldn't."
+
+"He'll find no spot to lay his head in Our Square, ma'am," the polite
+Estate assured her.
+
+"If he wants to stay, he'll have to live in his van."
+
+"Grand little idea! I'll do it. I'll be a van hermit and fast and watch
+and pray beneath your windows."
+
+"You may live in your van forever," retorted the justly incensed
+butterfly, "but I'll never speak to you as long as I live in this house.
+Never, never, _never_!"
+
+She vanished beyond the outrageous decorations of the wall. The Mordaunt
+Estate took down the "To Let" sign, and went in search of a helper to
+unload the van. The deserted and denounced young man crawled into his
+own van and lay down with his head on a tantalus and his feet on the
+collected works of Thackeray, to consider what had happened to him. But
+his immediate memories were not conducive to sober consideration, shot
+through as they were with the light of deep-gray eyes and the fugitive
+smile of lips sensitive to every changeful thought. So he fell to
+dreams. As to the meeting which had brought the now parted twain to Our
+Square, it had come about in this wise:
+
+Two miles northwest of Our Square as the sparrow flies, on the brink of
+a maelstrom of traffic, two moving-vans which had belied their name by
+remaining motionless for five impassioned minutes, disputed the right of
+way, nose to nose, while the injurious remarks of the respective drivers
+inflamed the air. A girlish but decided voice from within the recesses
+of the larger van said: "Don't give an inch."
+
+Deep inside the other vehicle a no less decisive barytone said what
+sounded like "Give an ell," but probably was not, as there was no
+corresponding movement of the wheels.
+
+What the van drivers said is the concern of the censor. What they did
+upon descending to the sidewalk comes under the head of direct action,
+and as such was the concern of the authorities which pried them asunder
+and led them away. Thereupon the inner habitants of the deserted
+equipages emerged from amid their lares and penates, and met face to
+face. The effect upon the occupant of the smaller van was electric, not
+to say paralytic.
+
+"Oh, glory!" he murmured faintly, with staring eyes.
+
+"Would you kindly move?" said the girl, in much the same tone that one
+would employ toward an obnoxious beetle, supposing that one ever
+addressed a beetle with freezing dignity.
+
+The young man directed a suffering look upon his van. "I've done nothing
+else for the last three days. Tell me where I can move to and I'll bless
+you as a benefactress of the homeless."
+
+"Anywhere out of my way," she replied with a severity which the corners
+of her sensitive mouth were finding it hard to live up to.
+
+"Behold me eliminated, deleted, expunged," he declared humbly. "But
+first let me explain that when I told my idiot chauffeur to give
+'em--that is, to hold his ground, I didn't know who you were."
+
+She wrinkled dainty brows at him. "Well, you don't know who I am now, do
+you?"
+
+"I don't have to," he responded with fervor. "Just on sight you may have
+all of this street and as many of the adjoining avenues as you can use.
+By the way, who _are_ you?" The question was put with an expression of
+sweet and innocent simplicity.
+
+The girl looked at him hard and straight. "I don't think that
+introductions are necessary."
+
+He sighed outrageously. "They Met but to Part; Laura Jean Libbey;
+twenty-fourth large edition," he murmured. "And I was just about to
+present myself as Martin Dyke, vagrant, but harmless, and very much at
+your service. However, I perceive with pain that it is, indeed, my move.
+May I help you up to the wheel of your ship? I infer that you intend
+driving yourself."
+
+"I'll have to, if I'm to get anywhere." A look of dismay overspread her
+piquant face. "Oh, dear! I don't in the least understand this machinery.
+I can't drive this kind of car."
+
+"Glory be!" exclaimed Mr. Dyke. "I mean, that's too bad," he amended
+gracefully. "Won't you let me take you where you want to go?"
+
+"What'll become of your van, then? Besides, I haven't any idea where I
+want to go."
+
+"What! Are you, too, like myself, a wandering home-seeker on the face of
+an overpopulated earth, Miss?"
+
+The "Miss" surprised her. Why the sudden lapse on the part of this
+extraordinary and self-confident young person into the terminology of
+the servant class?
+
+"Yes, I am," she admitted.
+
+"A hundred thousand helpless babes in the wood," he announced
+sonorously, "are wandering about, lost and homeless on this melancholy
+and moving day of October 1st, waiting for the little robins to come and
+bury them under the brown and withered leaves. Ain't it harrowing, Miss!
+Personally I should prefer to have the last sad dirge sung over me by a
+quail on toast, or maybe a Welsh rabbit. What time did you breakfast,
+Miss? I had a ruined egg at six-fifteen."
+
+The girl surrendered to helpless and bewildered laughter. "You ask the
+most personal questions as if they were a matter of course."
+
+"By way of impressing you with my sprightly and entertaining
+individuality, so that you will appreciate the advantages to be derived
+from my continued acquaintance, and grapple me to your soul with hooks
+of steel, as Hamlet says. Or was it Harold Bell Wright? Do you care for
+reading, Miss? I've got a neat little library inside, besides an
+automatic piano and a patent ice-box.... By the way, Miss, is that
+policeman doing setting-up exercises or motioning us to move on? _I_
+think he is."
+
+"But I can't move on," she said pathetically.
+
+"Couldn't you work my van, Miss? It's quite simple."
+
+She gave it a swift examination. "Yes," said she. "It's almost like my
+own car."
+
+"Then I'll lead, and you follow, Miss."
+
+"But I can't--I don't know who--I don't _want_ your van. Where shall
+we--"
+
+"Go?" he supplied. "To jail, I judge, unless we go somewhere else and do
+it _now_. Come on! We're off!"
+
+Overborne by his insistence and further influenced by the scowl of the
+approaching officer, she took the wheel. At the close of some involved
+but triumphant maneuverings the exchanged vans removed themselves from
+the path of progress, headed eastward to Fourth Avenue and bore
+downtownward. Piloting a strange machine through rush traffic kept the
+girl in the trailer too busy for speculation, until, in the recesses of
+a side street, her leader stopped and she followed suit. Mr. Dyke's
+engaging and confident face appeared below her.
+
+"Within," he stated, pointing to a quaint Gothic doorway, "they dispense
+the succulent pig's foot and the innocuous and unconvincing
+near-but-not-very-beer. It is also possible to get something to eat and
+drink. May I help you down, Miss?"
+
+"No," said the girl dolefully. "I want to go home."
+
+"But on your own showing, you haven't any home."
+
+"I've got to find one. Immediately."
+
+"You'll need help, Miss. It'll take some finding."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't call me Miss," she said with evidences of
+petulance.
+
+"Have it your own way, Lady. We strive to please, as R.L. Stevenson
+says. Or is it R.H. Macy? Anyway, a little bite of luncheon Lady, while
+we discuss the housing problem--"
+
+"Why are you calling me Lady, now?"
+
+He shook a discouraged head. "You seem very hard to please, Sister. I've
+tried you with Miss and I've tried you with Lady--"
+
+"Are you a gentleman or are you a--a--"
+
+"Don't say it, Duchess. Don't! Remember what Tennyson says: 'One hasty
+line may blast a budding hope.' Or was it Burleson? When you deny to the
+companion of your wanderings the privilege of knowing your name, what
+can he do but fall back for guidance upon that infallible chapter in the
+Gents' Handbook of Classy Behavior, entitled, 'From Introduction's
+Uncertainties to Friendship's Fascinations'?"
+
+"We haven't even been introduced," she pointed out.
+
+"Pardon me. We have. By the greatest of all Masters of Ceremonies, Old
+Man Chance. Heaven knows what it may lead to," he added piously. "Now,
+Miss--or Lady--or Sister, as the case may be; or even Sis (I believe
+that form is given in the Gents' Handbook), if you will put your lily
+hand in mine--"
+
+"Wait. Promise me not to call me any of those awful things during
+luncheon, and afterward I may tell you my name. It depends."
+
+"A test! I'm on. We're off."
+
+Mr. Martin Dyke proved himself capable of selecting a suitable repast
+from an alien-appearing menu. In the course of eating it they pooled
+their real-estate impressions and information. He revealed that there
+was no available spot fit to dwell in on the West Side, or in mid-town.
+She had explored Park Avenue and the purlieus thereof extensively and
+without success. There remained only the outer darkness to the southward
+for anything which might meet the needs of either. In the event of a
+discovery they agreed, on her insistence, to gamble for it by the
+approved method of the tossed coin: "The winner has the choice."
+
+Throughout the luncheon the girl approved her escort's manner and
+bearing as unexceptionable. No sooner had they entered into the implied
+intimacy of the tête-à-tête across a table than a subtle change
+manifested itself in his attitude. Gayety was still the keynote of his
+talk, but the note of the personal and insistent had gone. And, at the
+end, when he had paid the bill and she asked:
+
+"What's my share, please?"
+
+"Two-ten," he replied promptly and without protest.
+
+"My name," said she, "is Anne Leffingwell."
+
+"Thank you," he replied gravely. But the twinkle reappeared in his eye
+as he added: "Of course, that was rudimentary about the check."
+
+Before she had fully digested this remark they were on the sidewalk
+again. In the act of escorting her to his van, now under her guidance,
+he suddenly stopped in front of hers and lost himself in wondering
+contemplation of the group painted on the side in the best style of
+tea-store art.
+
+"Suffering Raphael!" he exclaimed at length. "What's the lady in the
+pink shroud supposed to be saying to the bearded patriarch in the
+nightie? What's it all about, anyway?"
+
+"The title," replied Anne Leffingwell, indicating a line of
+insignificant lettering, "is 'Swedish Wedding Feast.'"
+
+"Wedding feast," he repeated thoughtfully, looking from the picture to
+his companion. "Well," he raised an imaginary glass high, "prosit omen!"
+
+The meaning was not to be mistaken. "Well, really," she began
+indignantly. "If you are going to take advantage--"
+
+"You're not supposed to understand Latin," interposed Mr. Dyke hastily.
+He grew flustered and stood, for once, at a loss. For some subtle reason
+her heart warmed to his awkwardness as it never would have done to his
+over-enterprising adroitness.
+
+"We must be going on," she said.
+
+He gave her a grateful glance. "I was afraid I'd spilled the apple cart
+and scared Eve clean out of the orchard that time," he murmured. Having
+helped her to her place at the wheel, he stood bareheaded for a moment,
+turned away, came back, and asked abruptly:
+
+"Sister of Budge Leffingwell, the Princeton half-back?"
+
+"No. Cousin."
+
+"I knew Old Man Chance had a happy coincidence up his sleeve somewhere,"
+he declared with profound and joyous conviction.
+
+"Are you a friend of Budge's?"
+
+"Friend doesn't half express it! He made the touchdown that won me a
+clean hundred last season. Outside of that I wouldn't know him from
+Henry Ford. You see how Fate binds us together."
+
+"Will you tell me one thing, please?" pleaded Anne Leffingwell
+desperately. "Have you ever been examined for this sort of thing?"
+
+"Not yet. But then, you see, I'm only a beginner. This is my first
+attempt. I'll get better as I go on."
+
+"Will you please crank my car?" requested Anne Leffingwell faintly.
+
+Not until they reached Our Square did they speak again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All things come to him who, sedulously acting the orchid's part,
+vegetates and bides his time. To me in the passage of days came Anne
+Leffingwell, to talk of many things, the conversation invariably
+touching at some point upon Mr. Martin Dyke--and lingering there. She
+was solicitous, not to say skeptical, regarding Mr. Dyke's reason. Came
+also Martin Dyke to converse intelligently upon labor, free verse,
+ouija, the football outlook, O. Henry, Crucible Steel, and Mr.
+Leffingwell. He was both solicitous and skeptical regarding Mr.
+Leffingwell's existence. Now when two young persons come separately to
+an old person to discuss each other's affairs, it is a bad sign. Or
+perhaps a good sign. Just as you choose.
+
+Adopting the Mordaunt Estate's sardonic suggestion, Martin Dyke had
+settled down to van life in a private alleyway next to Number 37. Anne
+Leffingwell deemed this criminally extravagant since the rental of a van
+must be prodigious. ("Tell her not to worry; my family own the storage
+and moving plant," was one of his many messages that I neglected to
+deliver.) On his part he worried over the loneliness and simplicity of
+her establishment--one small but neat maid--which he deemed incongruous
+with her general effect of luxury and ease of life, and wondered whether
+she had split with her family. (She hadn't; "I've always been brought up
+like a--a--an artichoke," she confided to me. "So when father went West
+for six months, I just moved, and I'm going to be a potato and see how I
+like it. Besides, I've got some research work to do.")
+
+Every morning a taxi called and took her to an uptown library, and every
+afternoon she came back to the harlequin-fronted house at Number 37.
+Dyke's hours were such that he saw her only when she returned early, for
+he slept by day in his van, and worked most of the night on electrical
+experiments which he was conducting over on the river front, and which
+were to send his name resounding down the halls of fame. (The newspapers
+have already caught an echo or two.) On his way back from his
+experiments, he daily stopped at the shop of Eberling the Florist,
+where, besides chaste and elegant set pieces inscribed "Gates Ajar" and
+"Gone But Not Forgotten," one may, if expert and insistent, obtain
+really fresh roses. What connection these visits had with the matutinal
+arrival of deep pink blossoms addressed to nobody, but delivered
+regularly at the door of Number 37, I shall not divulge; no, not though
+a base attempt was made to incriminate me in the transaction.
+
+Between the pair who had arrived in Our Square on such friendly and
+promising terms, there was now no communication when they met. She was
+steadfastly adhering to that "Never. Never. _Never_!" What less, indeed,
+could be expected of a faithful wife insulted by ardent hopes of her
+husband's early demise from a young man whom she had known but four
+hours? So it might have gone on to a sterile conclusion but for a
+manifestation of rebellious artistic tastes on her part. The Mordaunt
+Estate stopped at my bench to complain about them one afternoon when
+Martin Dyke, having just breakfasted, had strolled over to discuss his
+favorite topic. (She was, at that very moment, knitting her dainty brows
+over the fifteenth bunch of pink fragrance and deciding regretfully that
+this thing must come to an end even if she had to call in Terry
+the Cop.)
+
+"That lady in Number 37," said the Mordaunt Estate bitterly, "ain't the
+lady I thought she was."
+
+Martin Dyke, under the impulse of his persistent obsession, looked up
+hopefully. "You mean that she isn't really _Mrs._ Leffingwell?"
+
+"I mean I'm disappointed in her; that's what I mean. She wants the house
+front painted over."
+
+"No!" I protested with polite incredulity.
+
+"Where's her artistic sense? I thought she admired your work so deeply."
+
+"She does, too," confirmed the Estate. "But she says it's liable to be
+misunderstood. She says ladies come there and order tea, and men ask the
+hired girl when the barbers come on duty, and one old bird with whiskers
+wanted to know if Ashtaroth, the Master of Destiny, told fortunes there.
+So she wants I should tone it down. I guess," pursued the Mordaunt
+Estate, stricken with gloom over the difficulty of finding the Perfect
+Tenant in an imperfect world, "I'll have to notice her to quit."
+
+"No; don't do that!" cried the young man. "Here! I'll repaint the whole
+wall for you free of charge."
+
+"What do _you_ know about R. Noovo art? Besides, paints cost money."
+
+"I'll furnish the paint, too," offered the reckless youth. "I'm crazy
+about art. It's the only solace of my declining years. And," he added
+cunningly and with evil intent to flatter and cajole, "I can tone down
+that design of yours without affecting its beauty and originality
+at all."
+
+Touched by this ingenuous tribute hardly less than by the appeal to his
+frugality, the Estate accepted the offer. From four to five on the
+following afternoon, Martin Dyke, appropriately clad in overalls, sat on
+a plank and painted. On the afternoon following that the lady of the
+house came home at four-thirty and caught him at it.
+
+"That's going to be ever so much nicer," she called graciously, not
+recognizing him from the view of his industrious-appearing back.
+
+"Thank you for those few kind words."
+
+"You!" she exclaimed indignantly as he turned a mild and benevolent beam
+of the eye upon her. "What are you doing to my house?"
+
+"Art. High art."
+
+"How did you get up there?"
+
+"Ladder. High ladder."
+
+"You know that isn't what I mean at all."
+
+"Oh! Well, I've taken a contract to tone down the Midway aspect of your
+highly respectable residence. One hour per day."
+
+"If you think that this performance is going to do you any good--" she
+began with withering intonation.
+
+"It's done that already," he hastened to assert. "You've recognized my
+existence again."
+
+"Only through trickery."
+
+"On the contrary, it's no trick at all to improve on the Mordaunt
+Estate's art. Now that we've made up again, Miss or Mrs. Leffingwell, as
+the case may be--"
+
+"We haven't made up. There's nothing to make up."
+
+"Amended to 'Now that we're on speaking terms once more.' Accepted?
+Thank you. Then let me thank you for those lovely flowers you've been
+sending me. You can't imagine how they brighten and sweeten my simple
+and unlovely van life, with their--"
+
+"Mr. Dyke!" Her eyes were flashing now and her color was deeper than the
+pink of the roses which she had rejected. "You must know that you had no
+right to send me flowers and that in returning them--"
+
+"Returning? But, dear lady--or girl, as the case may be [here she
+stamped a violent foot]--if you feel it your duty to return them, why
+not return them to the florist or the sender? Marked though my
+attentions may have been, does that justify you in assuming that I am,
+so to speak, the only floral prospect in the park? There's the Dominie,
+for instance. He's notoriously your admirer, and I've seen him at
+Eberling's quite lately." (Mendacious young scoundrel!)
+
+For the moment she was beguiled by the plausibility of his manner.
+
+"How should he know that pink roses are my favorites?" she said
+uncertainly.
+
+"How should _I_, for that matter?" he retorted at once. "Though any
+idiot could see at a glance that you're at least half sister to the
+whole rose tribe."
+
+"Now you're beginning again," she complained. "You see, it's impossible
+to treat you as an ordinary acquaintance."
+
+"But what do you think of me as a painter-man?" inquired the bewildering
+youth.
+
+Preparatory to entering the house she had taken off her gloves, and now
+one pinky-brown hand rested on the door lintel below him. "The question
+is," said she, "wasn't it really you that sent the roses, and don't you
+realize that you mustn't?"
+
+"The question is," he repeated, "whether, being denied the ordinary
+avenues of approach to a shrine, one is justified in jumping the fence
+with one's votive offerings. Now I hold--"
+
+Her left hand, shifting a little, flashed a gleam of gold into his eager
+eyes, striking him into silence. When he spoke again, all the vividness
+was gone from his voice. "I beg your pardon," he said. "Yes; I sent the
+roses. You shan't be troubled again in that way--or any other way. Do
+you mind if I finish this job?"
+
+Victory for the defense! Yet the rosebud face of Anne Leffingwell
+expressed concern and doubt rather than gratification. There is such a
+thing as triumph being too complete.
+
+"I think you're doing it very nicely," was the demure reply.
+
+Notwithstanding this encomium, the workman knocked off early to sit on
+my bench and indulge in the expression of certain undeniable but vague
+truisms, such as that while there is life there is hope, and it isn't
+necessary to display a marriage license in order to purchase a plain
+gold band. But his usual buoyant optimism was lacking; he spoke like one
+who strives to convince himself. Later on the lady in the case paused to
+offer to me some contumelious if impersonal reflections upon love at
+first sight, which she stigmatized as a superstition unworthy of the
+consideration of serious minds. But there was a dreamy light in her
+eyes, and the smile on her lips, while it may not have been expressive
+of serious consideration, was not wholly condemnatory. The carnivorous
+orchid was having a good day and keeping its own counsel as a sensible
+orchid expectant of continued patronage should do.
+
+There was an obviously somber tinge to Mr. Dyke's color scheme on the
+following afternoon, tending to an over-employment of black, when an
+impressive and noiseless roadster purred its way to the curb, there
+discharging a quite superb specimen of manhood in glorious raiment. The
+motorist paused to regard with unfeigned surprise the design of the
+house front. Presently he recovered sufficiently to ask:
+
+"Could you tell me if Miss Leffingwell lives here?"
+
+The painter turned upon his precarious plank so sharply that he was all
+but precipitated into the area. "_Who_?" he said.
+
+"Miss Leffingwell."
+
+"You don't mean Mrs. Leffingwell?" queried the aerial operator in a
+strained tone.
+
+"No; I don't. I mean Miss Anne Leffingwell."
+
+The painter flourished the implement of his trade to the peril of the
+immaculate garments below. "Toora-loo!" he warbled.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the new arrival.
+
+"I said 'Toora-loo.' It's a Patagonian expression signifying
+satisfaction and relief; sort of I-thought-so-all-the-time effect."
+
+"You seem a rather unusual and learned sort of house painter," reflected
+the stalwart Adonis. "Is that Patagonian art?"
+
+"Symbolism. It represents hope struggling upward from the oppression of
+doubt and despair. That," he added, splashing in a prodigal streak of
+whooping scarlet, "is resurgent joy surmounting the misty
+mountain-tops of--"
+
+The opening door below him cut short the disquisition.
+
+"Reg!" cried the tenant breathlessly. Straight into the big young man's
+ready arms she dived, and the petrified and stricken occupant of the
+dizzy plank heard her muffled voice quaver: "Wh--wh--wh--why didn't you
+come before?"
+
+To which the young giant responded in gallingly protective tones: "You
+little idiot!"
+
+The door closed after them. Martin Dyke, amateur house painter,
+continued blindly to bedeck the face of a ruinous world with radiant
+hues. After interminable hours (as he reckoned the fifteen elapsed
+minutes) the tenant escorted her visitor to the door and stood watching
+him as the powerful and unassertive motor departed. Dazedly the artist
+descended from his plank to face her.
+
+"Are you going?" he demanded.
+
+A perfectly justifiable response to this unauthorized query would have
+been that it was no concern of his. But there was that in Martin Dyke's
+face which hurt the girl to see.
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+"With him?"
+
+"Ye--es."
+
+"He isn't your husband."
+
+"No."
+
+"You haven't any husband."
+
+She hung her head guiltily.
+
+"Why did you invent one?"
+
+Instead of replying verbally she raised her arm and pointed across the
+roadway to a patch of worn green in the park. He followed the indication
+with his eyes. A Keep-Off-the-Grass sign grinned spitefully in his face.
+
+"I see. The invention was for my special benefit."
+
+"Safety first," she murmured.
+
+"I never really believed it--except when you took me by surprise," he
+pursued. "That's why I--I went ahead."
+
+"You certainly went ahead," she confirmed. "What are speed laws to you!"
+
+"You're telling me that I haven't played the game according to the
+rules. I know I haven't. One has to make his own rules when Fate is in
+the game against him." He seemed to be reviewing something in his mind.
+"Fate," he observed sententiously, "is a cheap thimble-rigger."
+
+"Fate," she said, "is the ghost around the corner."
+
+"A dark green, sixty-horse-power ghost, operated by a matinée hero, a
+movie close-up, a tailor's model--"
+
+"If you mean Reg, it's just as well for you he isn't here."
+
+"Pooh!" retorted the vengeful and embittered Dyke. "I could wreck his
+loveliness with one flop of my paint-brush."
+
+"Doubtless," she agreed with a side glance at the wall, now bleeding
+from every pore. "It's a fearful weapon. Spare my poor Reg."
+
+"I suppose," said Dyke, desperate now, but not quite bankrupt of hope,
+"you'd like me to believe that he's your long-lost brother."
+
+She lowered her eyes, possibly to hide the mischief in them. "No," she
+returned hesitantly and consciously. "He isn't--exactly my brother."
+
+He recalled the initials, "R.B.W.," on the car's door. Hope sank for the
+third time without a bubble. "Good-bye," said Martin Dyke.
+
+"Surely you're not going to quit your job unfinished," she protested.
+
+Dyke said something forcible and dismissive about the job.
+
+"What will the Mordaunt Estate think?"
+
+Dyke said something violent and destructive about the Mordaunt Estate.
+
+"Perhaps you'd like to take the house, now that it's vacant."
+
+Dyke, having expressed a preference for the tomb as a place of
+residence, went on his gloomful way shedding green paint on one side and
+red on the other.
+
+Insomnia, my old enemy, having clutched me that night, I went to my
+window and looked abroad over Our Square, as Willy Woolly's memorial
+clock was striking four (it being actually five-thirty). A shocking
+sight afflicted my eyes. My bench was occupied by a bum. Hearing the
+measured footsteps of Terry the Cop, guardian of our destinies, I looked
+for a swift and painful eviction. Terry, after a glance, passed on.
+Nothing is worse for insomnia than an unsolved mystery. Slipping into my
+clothes, I made my way softly to the spot. There in the seat where I was
+wont to pursue my even tenor as an orchid slumbered Martin Dyke, amateur
+desecrator of other men's houses, challenger of the wayward fates,
+fanatic of a will-o'-the-wisp pursuit, desperate adventurer in the
+uncharted realms of love; and in his face, turned toward the
+polychromatic abominations of the house, so soon to be deserted, was all
+the pathos and all the beauty of illusion-haunted youth.
+
+Ah, youth! Blundering, ridiculous youth! An absurd period, excusable
+only on the score of its brevity. A parlous condition! A traitorous
+guide, froward, inspired of all manner of levity, pursuant of hopeless
+phantasms, dupe of roseate and pernicious myths (love-at-first-sight,
+and the like), butt of the High Gods' stinging laughter, deserving of
+nothing kinder than mockery from the aged and the wise--which is
+doubtless why we old and sage folk thank Heaven daily, uplifting cracked
+voices and withered hands, that we are no longer young. A pious and
+fraudulent litany for which may we be forgiven! My young friend on the
+bench stirred. A shaft of moonlight, streaming through the bush upon his
+face, bewitched him to unguarded speech:
+
+"Dominie, I have been dreaming."
+
+Fearing to break the spell, I stood silent.
+
+"A fairy came down to me and touched her lips to mine, so lightly, so
+softly. Did you know there were fairies in Our Square, Dominie?"
+
+"Always."
+
+"I think her name is Happiness. Is there such a fairy in this world,
+Dominie?"
+
+"There has been."
+
+"Then there will always be. I think it was Happiness because she went
+away so quickly."
+
+"Happiness does. Did you try to hold her?"
+
+"So hard! But I was clumsy and rough. She slipped through my arms."
+
+"Did she leave nothing?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Then what is this?" I lifted from the ground at his feet a single petal
+of pink rose, fragrant, unwithered, and placed it in his hand.
+
+"The fairy's kiss," he said dreamily. "That's for farewell."
+
+The moon, dipped beyond a cloud, dissolved the spell. Youth straightened
+up brusquely on its bench, rubbing enchantment from its eyes.
+
+"Have I been talking in my sleep, Dominie?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"What kind of talk? Nonsense?"
+
+"Nonsense--or wisdom. How should I know?"
+
+"Dominie, is there a perfume in the air? A smell of roses?"
+
+"Look in your hand."
+
+He opened his fingers slowly and closed them again, tenderly, jealously.
+"I must go now," he said vaguely. "May I come back to see you
+sometimes, Dominie?"
+
+"Perhaps you'll bring Happiness with you," I said.
+
+But he only shook his head. On the morrow his van was gone from the
+alley and the house at Number 37, which had once been the House of
+Silvery Voices, was voiceless again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something of the savor of life went with the vanners out of Our Square.
+I missed their broad-ranging and casual talk of politics, art, religion,
+the fourth dimension, and one another. Yet I felt sure that I should see
+them both again. There is a spell woven in Our Square--it has held me
+these sixty years and more, and I wonder at times whether Death himself
+can break it--which draws back the hearts that have once known the
+place. It was a long month, though, before the butterfly fluttered back.
+More radiant than ever she looked, glowing softly in the brave November
+sun, as she approached my bench. But there was something indefinably
+wistful about her. She said that she had come to satisfy her awakened
+appetite for the high art of R. Noovo, as she faced the unaltered and
+violent frontage of Number 37.
+
+"Empty," said I.
+
+"Then he didn't take my advice and rent it. The painter-man, I mean."
+
+"He's gone."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I haven't an idea."
+
+"Doesn't he ever come back?"
+
+"You must not assume," said I with severity, "that you are the only
+devotee of high art. You may perhaps compare your devotion to that of
+another whom I might mention when you, too, have lost ten pounds and
+gained ten years--"
+
+"Dominie! Has he?"
+
+"Has he what?"
+
+"G-g-g-gained ten pounds. I mean, lost ten years."
+
+"I haven't said so."
+
+"Dominie, you are a cruel old man," accused the butterfly.
+
+"And you are a wicked woman."
+
+"I'm not. I'm only twenty," was her irrelevant but natural defense.
+
+"Witness, on your oath, answer; were you at any time in the evening or
+night before you departed from this, Our Square, leaving us
+desolate--were you, I say, abroad in the park?
+
+"Y-y-yes, your Honor."
+
+"In the immediate vicinity of this bench?"
+
+"Benches are very alike in the dark."
+
+"But occupants of them are not. Don't fence with the court. Were you
+wearing one or more roses of the general hue and device of those now
+displayed in your cheeks?"
+
+"The honorable court has nothing to do with my face," said the witness
+defiantly.
+
+"On the contrary, your face is the _corpus delicti._ Did you, taking
+advantage of the unconscious and hence defenseless condition of my
+client, that is, of Mr. Martin Dyke, lean over him and deliberately
+imprint a--"
+
+"No! No! No! No! _No_!" cried the butterfly with great and unconvincing
+fervor. "How dare you accuse me of such a thing?"
+
+"On the circumstantial evidence of a pink rose petal. But worse is
+coming. The charge is unprovoked and willful murder."
+
+Butterflies are strange creatures. This one seemed far less concerned
+over the latter than the former accusation. "Of whom?" she inquired.
+
+"You have killed a budding poet." Here I violated a sacred if implied
+confidence by relating what the bewitched sleeper on the bench had said
+under the spell of the moon.
+
+The result was most gratifying. The butterfly assured me with
+indignation that it was only a cold in her head, which had been annoying
+her for days: _that_ was what made her eyes act so, and I was a
+suspicious and malevolent old gentleman--and--and--and perhaps some day
+she and Mr. Martin Dyke might happen to meet.
+
+"Is that a message?" I asked.
+
+"No," answered the butterfly with a suspicion of panic in her eyes.
+
+"Then?" I queried.
+
+"He's so--so awfully go-aheadish," she complained.
+
+"I'll drop him a hint," I offered kindly.
+
+"It might do some good. I'm afraid of him," she confessed.
+
+"And a little bit of yourself?" I suggested.
+
+The look of scorn which she bent upon me would have withered
+incontinently anything less hardy than a butterfly-devouring orchid. It
+passed and thoughtfulness supplanted it. "If you really think that he
+could be influenced to be more--well, more conventional--"
+
+"I guarantee nothing; but I'm a pedagogue by profession and have taught
+some hard subjects in my time."
+
+"Then do you think you could give him a little message, word for word as
+I give it to you?"
+
+"Senile decay," I admitted, "may have paralyzed most of my faculties,
+but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful as a phonograph."
+
+"Tell him this, then." She ticked the message off on her fingers. "A
+half is not exactly the same as a whole. Don't forget the 'exactly.'"
+
+"Is this an occasion for mathematical axioms?" I demanded. But she had
+already gone, with a parting injunction to be precise.
+
+When, three days thereafter, I retailed that banality to young Mr. Dyke,
+it produced a startling though not instantaneous effect.
+
+"I've got it!" he shouted.
+
+"Don't scare me off my bench! What is it you've got?"
+
+"The answer. She said he was not exactly her brother."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"That bully-looking big chap in the roadster who took her away." He
+delivered this shameless reversal of a passionately asserted opinion
+without a quiver. "Now she says a half isn't exactly the same as a
+whole. He wasn't exactly her brother, she said; he's her half brother.
+'Toora-loora-loo,' as we say in Patagonia."
+
+"For Patagonia it sounds reasonable. What next?"
+
+"Next and immediately," said Mr. Dyke, "I am obtaining an address from
+the Mordaunt Estate, and I am then taking this evening off."
+
+"Take some advice also, my boy," said I, mindful of the butterfly's
+alarms. "Go slow."
+
+"Slow! Haven't I lost time enough already?"
+
+"Perhaps. But now you've got all there is. Don't force the game. You've
+frightened that poor child so that she never can feel sure what you're
+going to do next."
+
+"Neither can I, Dominie," confessed the candid youth. "But you're quite
+right. I'll clamp on the brakes. I'll be as cool and conventional as a
+slice of lemon on an iced clam. 'How well you're looking to-night, Miss
+Leffingwell'--that'll be my nearest approach to unguarded personalities.
+Trust me, Dominie, and thank you for the tip."
+
+The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of
+the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my
+astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully
+though inappropriately clad in full evening dress with a pink rose in
+his coat lapel, and gazing at Number 37 with a wild, ecstatic glare.
+
+"What have you been doing here all night?" I asked.
+
+"Thinking."
+
+I pointed to the flower. "Where did you get that?"
+
+"A fairy gift."
+
+"Martin," said I, "did you abide by my well-meant and inspired advice?"
+
+"Dominie," replied the youth with a guilty flush, "I did my best. I--I
+tried to. You mustn't think--Nothing is settled. It's only that--"
+
+"It's only that Age is a fool to advise Youth. Why should I expect you
+to abide by my silly counsels? Who am I to interfere with the dominant
+fates! Says the snail to the avalanche: 'Go slow!' and the avalanche--"
+
+"Hey! Hi! You Mordaunt Estate!" broke in young Mr. Dyke, shouting. "I
+beg your pardon, Dominie, I've got to see the Estate for a minute."
+
+Rushing across the street, he intercepted that institutional gentleman
+in the act of dipping a brush into a can in front of Number 37.
+
+"Don't, for Heaven's sake, touch that front!" implored the improver of
+it.
+
+"Why not?" demanded the Estate.
+
+"I want to rent it. As it is. From to-day."
+
+The Mordaunt Estate turned a dull, Wagboomish look of denial upon him.
+"Nope," said he. "I've had enough of short rentals. It don't pay. I'm
+going to paint her up and lease her for good."
+
+"I'll take your lease," insisted Martin Dyke.
+
+"For how long a period?" inquired the other, in terms of the Estate
+again.
+
+The light that never was, on sea or land, the look that I had surprised
+on the face of illusion-haunted Youth in the moon glow, gleamed in
+Martin Dyke's eyes.
+
+"Say a million years," he answered softly.
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN OF GOD'S ACRE
+
+As far as the eye could apprehend him, he was palpably an outlander. No
+such pink of perfection ever sprung from the simple soil of Our Square.
+A hard pink it was, suggestive less of the flower than of enameled
+metal. He was freshly shaved, freshly pressed, freshly anointed, and, as
+he paced gallantly across my vision, I perceived him to be slightly
+grizzled at the temples, but nevertheless of a vigorous and grim
+youthfulness that was almost daunting. Not until he returned and stood
+before me with his feet planted a little apart, giving an impression of
+purposeful immovability to his wiry figure, did I note that his eyes
+belied the general jauntiness of his personality. They were cold, direct
+eyes, with a filmy appearance, rather like those of a morose and
+self-centered turtle which had lived in our fountain until the day the
+Rosser twins fell in, when it crawled out and emigrated.
+
+"Nice day," said the stranger, shifting a patent-leathered foot out of a
+puddle.
+
+"Very," I agreed. Finical over-accuracy about the weather is likely to
+discourage a budding acquaintanceship.
+
+"Have one?" He extended a gemmed cigarette-case, and when, removing my
+pipe, I had declined in suitable terms, lighted up, himself. He then sat
+down upon the dryest portion of the bench not occupied by my person.
+
+"Whiplash win in the fi'th," he volunteered presently.
+
+"Yes?" said I with a polite but spurious show of interest.
+
+"Under a pull. Spread-eagled his field."
+
+"Who is Whiplash, may I ask?"
+
+"Oh, Gaw!" said the pink man, appalled. He searched my face
+suspiciously. "A hoss," he stated at length, satisfied of my ignorance.
+
+After several reflective puffs, the smoke of which insufficiently veiled
+his furtive appraisal of myself, he tried again:
+
+"They give O'Dowd a shade, last night."
+
+"Indeed? Who did?"
+
+"The sporting writers."
+
+"As a testimonial?" I inquired, adding that a shade, whether of the lamp
+or sun species seemed an unusual sort of gift.
+
+My interlocutor groaned. He drew from the pocket of his gray-check
+cutaway, purple and fine linen, the purple being an ornate and
+indecipherable monogram, wherewith to wipe his troubled brow. Susan
+Gluck's Orphan, who was playing down-wind, paused to inhale deeply and
+with a beatific expression. Restoring the fragrant square to its
+repository, the pink one essayed another conversational skirmish.
+
+"The Reds copped again yesterday."
+
+"If you are referring to the raid on Anarchist Headquarters in Avenue C,
+I should have inferred that the Reds _were_ copped, to use your term."
+
+Curt and contemptuous laughter was his response. "Don't you ever read
+the papers, down here?"
+
+"Certainly," I retorted with some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our
+Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications
+when you inter--when you arrived. It contains some very
+interesting poetry."
+
+"Yeh?" said the hard, pink man politely.
+
+"For example, in this issue I find the following apostrophe." I
+proceeded to read aloud:
+
+  "Farewell, our dear one, we must part,
+  For thou hast gone to heavenly home,
+  While we below with aching heart
+  Must long for thee and ever moan."
+
+"Swell stuff," commented the sharer of my bench, with determined
+interest. "Poetry's a little out of my line, but I'm _for_ it. Who
+wrote that?"
+
+"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship
+rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park
+fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or
+mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square."
+
+This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in
+revenge for his previous display of erudition. The bewilderment in his
+face told me that I had scored heavily. But he quickly rallied.
+
+"Do I get you right?" he queried. "Does he write those hymns for other
+folks to sign?"
+
+"He does."
+
+"What does he do that for?"
+
+"Money. He gets as high as five dollars per stanza."
+
+"Some salesman!" My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure
+overhanging the fence with new respect. "Looks to me like the original
+Gloom," he observed. "What's _his_ grouch?"
+
+"Conscience."
+
+"He must have a bum one!"
+
+"He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow
+repenting of our sins."
+
+"Whose sins?" asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.
+
+"Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square."
+
+My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had
+long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a
+monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. "He's got a nerve!"
+he asserted.
+
+Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my
+theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for
+Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a
+usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never
+do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to
+account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against
+the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little
+house near the corner"--I waved an illustrative hand--"he can quote
+Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him.
+He's coming this way now."
+
+"Good day, Dominie," said Bartholomew Storrs, as he passed, in such a
+tone as a very superior angel might employ toward a particularly
+damned soul.
+
+"That frown," I explained to my companion, after returning the
+salutation, "means that I failed to attend church yesterday."
+
+But the hard, pink man had lost interest in Bartholomew. "Called you
+'Dominie,' didn't he?" he remarked. "I thought I had you right. Heard of
+you from a little red-headed ginger-box named Smith."
+
+"You know the Little Red Doctor?"
+
+"I met him," he replied evasively. "He told me to look you up. 'You talk
+to the Dominie,' he says."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"I'm coming to that." He leaned forward to place a muscular and
+confidential hand on my knee. "First, I'd like to do you a little
+favor," he continued in his husky and intimate voice. "If you're looking
+for some quick and easy money, I got a little tip that I'd like to pass
+on to you."
+
+"Evidently the Little Red Doctor told you that my mind was a tottering
+ruin, which may be quite true; but if it's a matter of investing in the
+Peruvian Gold, Rubber Tree, and Perpetual Motion Concession, I'm
+reluctantly compelled--"
+
+"Forget it!" adjured the hard, pink man in a tone which secured my
+silence and almost my confidence. "This is a hoss. Seven to one, and a
+sure cop. I _know_ hosses. I've owned 'em."
+
+"Thank you, but I can't afford such luxuries as betting."
+
+"You can't afford _not_ to have something down on this if it's only a
+shoestring. No? Oh--well!"
+
+Again drawing the art-square from his pocket he lifted his pearl-gray
+derby and dabbed despairingly at his brow. Catching the scent hot and
+fresh, Susan Gluck's Orphan came dashing up-wind giving tongue, or
+rather, nose, voluptuously.
+
+"Mm-m-m! Snmmff!" inhaled the Orphan, wrinkling ecstatic nostrils.
+"Mister, lemme smell it some more!"
+
+Graciously the dispenser of fragrance waved his balm-laden handkerchief.
+"Like it, kiddie?" he said.
+
+"Oh, it's _grand_!" She stretched out her little grimy paws. "Please,
+Mister," she entreated, "would you flop it over 'em, just once?"
+
+The pink man tossed it to her. "Take it along and, when you get it all
+snuffed up, give it back to the Dominie here for me."
+
+"Oh, gracious!" said the Orphan, incredulous at this bounty. "Can I have
+it till _to-morrah_?"
+
+"Sure! What's the big idea for to-morrow?"
+
+"I'm goin' to a funeral. I want it to cry in," said the Orphan
+importantly.
+
+"A funeral?" I asked. "In Our Square? Whose?"
+
+"My cousin Minnie. She's goin' to be buried in God's Acre, an' I'm
+invited 'cause I'm a r'lation. She married a sporting gentleman named
+Hines an' she died yesterday," said the precocious Orphan.
+
+So Minnie Munn, pretty, blithe, life-loving Minnie, whose going had hurt
+us so, had come back to Our Square, with all her love of life quenched.
+She had promised that she would come back, in the little, hysterical,
+defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait
+and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are
+buried just such letters as Minnie's farewell to her parents;
+rebellious, passionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break
+its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little
+Minnie was "going on the stage." A garish and perilous stage it was,
+whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. And now she was
+making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of
+Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the
+arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the
+mother (who could not wait for the promised return--she has lain in
+God's Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song,
+mournfully prophetic:
+
+  "Why did I bring thee, Sweet
+  Into a world of sin?--
+  Into a world of wonder and doubt
+  With sorrows and snares for the little white feet--
+  Into a world whence the going out
+  Is as dark as the coming in!"
+
+Old lips readily lend themselves to memory; I suppose I must have
+repeated the final lines aloud, for the pink man said, wearily
+but politely:
+
+"Very pretty. Something more in the local line?"
+
+"Hardly." I smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William
+Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm.
+
+"What's this--now--God's Acre the kid was talking about?" was his next
+question.
+
+"An old local graveyard."
+
+"Anything interesting?" he asked carelessly.
+
+"If you're interested in that sort of thing. Are you an antiquary?"
+
+"Sure!" he replied with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the
+answer would have been the same had I asked him if he was a dromedary.
+
+"Come along, then. I'll take you there."
+
+To reach that little green space of peace amidst our turmoil of the
+crowded, encroaching slums, we must pass the Bonnie Lassie's house,
+where her tiny figurines, touched with the fire of her love and her
+genius, which are perhaps one and the same, stand ever on guard, looking
+out over Our Square from her windows. Judging by his appearance and
+conversation, I should have supposed my companion to be as little
+concerned with art as with, let us say, poetry or local antiquities. But
+he stopped dead in his tracks, before the first window. Fingers that
+were like steel claws buried themselves in my arm. The other
+hand pointed.
+
+"What's that?" he muttered fiercely.
+
+"That," to which he was pointing, was a pictorial bronze, the figure of
+a girl, upright in a cockleshell boat, made of a rose-petal, her arms
+outspread to the breeze that was bearing her out across sunlit ripples.
+Beneath was the legend: "Far Ports." The face, eager, laughing,
+passionate, adventurous, was the face of Minnie Munn. Therein the Bonnie
+Lassie had been prophetess as well as poet and sculptress, for she had
+finished the bronze before Minnie left us.
+
+"That," I answered the strong, pink man, trying to shake loose his grip,
+"is a sculpture by Cecily Willard, otherwise Mrs. Cyrus Staten."
+
+"What'll she take for it?"
+
+"It can't be bought." I spoke with authority, for the figurines that the
+Bonnie Lassie sets in her window are not for sale, but for us of Our
+Square, who love them.
+
+"Anything can be bought," he retorted, with his quiet, hoarse
+persuasiveness, "at a price. I've got the price, no matter what it is."
+
+Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that
+stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but
+sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears. Behind such eyes the
+heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better
+than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was
+a wound, raw and fresh and savage. I put my hand on his shoulder.
+
+"What was little Minnie to you?" I asked, and answered myself. "You're
+Hines. You're the man she married."
+
+"Yes. I'm Chris Hines."
+
+"You've brought her back to us," I said stupidly.
+
+"She made me promise."
+
+Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once
+lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the
+hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny God's Acre,
+shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the
+encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few
+more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned
+courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as
+Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.
+
+I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and
+led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to
+the white-studded space of graves. The new excavation showed, brown
+against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns,
+solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year's salary, at the pitiful
+wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship.
+Hines's elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a
+shudder, as he looked about him.
+
+"It's crowded," he muttered.
+
+"We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her
+father's sake that Minnie wished to come back."
+
+"She said she couldn't rest peaceful anywhere else. She said she had
+some sort of right to be here."
+
+"The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square," said
+I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the
+descendants of the original "churchyard membership," and to them alone,
+the inalienable right to lie in God's Acre, provided, as in the ancient
+charter, they had "died in honorable estate." I added: "Bartholomew
+Storrs, as sexton, has constituted himself watchdog of our graves and
+censor of our dead. He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an
+attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company."
+
+"That sour-faced prohibitionist?" growled Mr. Hines, employing what I
+suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon. "Is he the sexton?"
+
+"The same. Our mortuary genius," I confirmed.
+
+"She was a good girl, Min was," said Mr. Hines firmly, though, it might
+appear, a trifle inconsequentially: "I don't care what they say. Anyway,
+after I met up with her"; in which qualifying afterthought lay a whole
+sorrowful and veiled history.
+
+I waited.
+
+"What did they say about her, down here?" he asked jealously.
+
+"Oh, there were rumors. They didn't reach her father."
+
+"No: tell me," he persisted. "I gotta know."
+
+Because Mr. Hines had already impressed himself upon me as one with whom
+straight talk would serve best, I acceded.
+
+"Bartholomew Storrs said that her feet took hold on hell."
+
+Mr. Hines's face remained impassive. Only his hands worked slightly,
+perhaps kneading an imaginary throat. I perceived him to be a person of
+considerable and perhaps formidable self-control.
+
+"Not that she hadn't her friends. The Bonnie Lassie would have stood by
+her if she had come back, and little Mrs. Morse, and our Dr. Smith, and
+MacLachan, who thought he had lost his own girl the same way, and--and
+others, plenty."
+
+"And you, Dominie," said the hard, pink Mr. Hines.
+
+"My dear sir, old men cannot afford harsh judgments. They are too near
+their own time."
+
+"Yeh?" said Mr. Hines absently. "I guess that's right." But his mind was
+plainly elsewhere. "When would you say would be the best time to do
+business with old Funeral-Clothes?" he asked after a thoughtful pause.
+
+"You want to see Bartholomew Storrs?" I interpreted.
+
+"Sure. I gotta deliver the death certificate to him if he runs the
+graveyard, haven't I?"
+
+"Such is the procedure, I believe."
+
+"Besides," he added with a leer, "I want to get some of that weepy
+poetry of his."
+
+"Well; he'll sell it to you readily."
+
+"I'll say he'll sell it to me," returned Mr. Hines with a grimness which
+I failed to comprehend.
+
+"Now is as good a time as any to catch him in his office." I pointed to
+a sign at the farther end of the yard.
+
+Mr. Hines seemed in no hurry to go. With his elegantly lacquered cane,
+he picked at the sod, undecidedly. His chill, veiled eyes roved about
+the open space. He lifted his pearl-gray derby, and, for lack of a
+handkerchief, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Although the
+May day was cool and brisk with wind, his knuckles glistened when they
+descended. I began to suspect that, despite his stony self-command, Mr.
+Hines's nerves were not all that they should be.
+
+"Perhaps you'd like me to introduce you to Mr. Storrs," I hazarded.
+
+The cold and filmy eyes gleamed with an instant's dim warmth. "Dominie,
+you're a good guy," responded Mr. Hines. "If a dead cinch at ten to one,
+all fruited up for next week, the kind of thing you don't hand on to
+your own brother, would be any use to you--No? I'm off again," he
+apologized. "Well--let's go."
+
+We went. At the doorstep of Bartholomew Storrs's office he paused.
+
+"This sexton-guy," he said anxiously, "he don't play the ponies, ever, I
+wouldn't suppose?"
+
+"No more often than he commits murder or goes to sleep in church," I
+smiled.
+
+"Yeh?" he answered, disheartened. "I gotta get to him some other way. On
+the poetry--and that's out of my line."
+
+"I don't quite see what your difficulty is."
+
+"By what you tell me, it's easier to break into a swell Fifth Avenue
+Club than into this place."
+
+"Except for those having the vested right, as your wife has."
+
+"And this sexton-guy handles the concession for--he's got the say-so,"
+he corrected himself hastily--"on who goes in and who stays out. Is
+that right?"
+
+"Substantially."
+
+"And he'd rather keep 'em out than let 'em in?"
+
+"Bartholomew," I explained, "considers that the honor of God's Acre is
+in his keeping. He has a fierce sort of jealousy about it, as if he had
+a proprietary interest in the place."
+
+"I get you!" Mr. Hines's corded throat worked painfully. "You don't
+suppose the old goat would slip Min a blackball?" he gulped.
+
+"How can he? As an 'Inalienable'--"
+
+"Yeh; I know. But wasn't there something about a clean record? I'll tell
+_you_, Dominie"--Mr. Hines's husky but assured voice trailed away into
+a miserable, thick whisper--"as to what he said--about her feet taking
+hold on hell--I guess there was a time--I guess about one more slip--I
+guess I didn't run across her any too quick. But there never was a
+straighter, truer girl than Min was with me. I gotta get her planted
+_right_, Dominie. I gotta do it," he concluded with pathetic
+earnestness.
+
+"I see no difficulty," I assured him. "The charter specifies '_died_ in
+honorable estate.' Matrimony is an honorable estate. How she lived
+before that is between her and a gentler Judge than Bartholomew Storrs."
+
+"Give her a straight course and a fair judge and I'll back Min to the
+limit," said Mr. Hines so simply and loyally that no suggestion of
+irreverence could attach to him.
+
+Nevertheless, doubt was mingled with determination in his florid face as
+he rang the bell. Bartholomew Storrs opened to us, himself. When he saw
+me, he hastily pocketed a Rhyming Dictionary. I introduced my companion,
+stating, by way of a favorable opening, that he was interested in
+memorial poetry.
+
+"Very pleased," said Bartholomew Storrs in his deep, lugubrious tones.
+"Bereaved husband?"
+
+Mr. Hines nodded.
+
+"Here's a tasty thing I just completed," continued the poet, and,
+extending a benignant hand toward the visitor he intoned nasally:
+
+  "Together we have lived our life
+  Till thou hast gone on high.
+  But I will come to thee, dear Wife,
+  In the sweet bye-and-bye."
+
+"That style five dollars," he said.
+
+"You're on," barked Mr. Hines. "I'll take it."
+
+"To be published, I suppose, on the first anniversary of death. Shall I
+look after the insertion in the papers?" queried the obliging poet, who
+split an advertising agent's percentage on memorial notices placed
+by him.
+
+"Sure. Got any more? I'd spend a hundred to do this right."
+
+With a smile of astounded gratification, Bartholomew accepted the roll
+of bills, fresh and crisp as the visitor himself. To do him justice, I
+believe that his pleasure was due as much to the recognition of his
+genius as to the stipend it had earned.
+
+"Perhaps you'd like a special elegy to be read at the grave," he rumbled
+eagerly. "When and where did the interment take place?"
+
+The other glared at him in stony surprise. "It ain't taken place. It's
+to-morrow. Ain't you on? I'm Hines."
+
+A frown darkened the sexton's heavy features. He shook a reprehensive
+head. "An unfortunate case," he boomed; "most unfortunate. I will not
+conceal from you, Mr. Hines, that I have consulted our attorneys upon
+this case, and unhappily--unhappily, I say--they hold that there is no
+basis for exclusion provided the certificate is in form. You have it
+with you?"
+
+Impassive and inscrutable, Mr. Hines tapped his breast-pocket.
+
+The conscience of a responsible sexton being assuaged, Bartholomew's
+expression mollified into that of the flattered poet.
+
+"Such being the case," he pursued, "there can be no objection to the
+reading of an elegy as part of the service. Who is to officiate?"
+
+"The Reverend Doctor Hackett."
+
+"He has retired these two years," said the sexton doubtfully. "He is
+very old. His mind sometimes wanders."
+
+"She wouldn't have any one else," asserted the hard, pink Mr. Hines.
+"She was as particular about that as about being buried yonder." He
+jerked his head toward the window.
+
+"Very well. I will be at the grave. I always am. Trust me to guide the
+reverend gentleman over any breach in his memory. Excuse me for a moment
+while I look up my elegies."
+
+"Say," said Mr. Hines in his hoarse, confidential croak, as the
+poet-sexton retired, "this is dead easy. Why, the guy's on the make. For
+sale. He'll stand for anything. Passing out this stuff for other folks
+to sign! He's a crook!"
+
+"Make no such mistake," I advised. "Bartholomew is as honest a man as
+lives, in his own belief."
+
+"Very likely. That's the worst kind," pronounced the expert Mr. Hines.
+
+Further commentary was cut off by the return of the sexton-poet. "If you
+will kindly give me the death certificate of the late lamented,"
+said he.
+
+"What becomes of it after I deliver it?" asked Mr. Hines.
+
+"Read, attested, and filed officially."
+
+"Any one else but you see it?"
+
+"Not necessarily."
+
+"That's all right, then."
+
+Hardly had Bartholomew Storrs glanced at the document received from Mr.
+Hines than he lifted a stiffening face.
+
+"What is this?" he challenged.
+
+"What's what?"
+
+The official tapped the paper with a gaunt finger. "'Minna Merivale,
+aged twenty-five,'" he read.
+
+"That's the name she went by."
+
+"_Unmarried_" read Bartholomew Storrs in a voice of doom.
+
+"Well?"
+
+In the sexton's eyes gleamed an unholy savagery of satisfaction. "Take
+her away."
+
+"_What_?"
+
+"Bury her somewhere else. Do not think that you can pollute the
+ground--"
+
+"Bartholomew!" I broke in, stepping hastily in front of Mr. Hines, for I
+had seen all the pink ebb out of his face, leaving it a dreadful sort of
+gray; and I had no desire to be witness of a murder, however much I
+might deem it justified.
+
+"I'll handle him," said Mr. Hines steadily. "Now; you! You got my
+hundred in your jeans, ain't you!"
+
+"Bribery!" boomed the sexton. He drew out the roll of bills and let it
+fall from his contaminated fingers.
+
+"Sure! Bribery," railed the other. "What'd you think? Ain't it enough
+for what I'm asking?" The two men glared at each other.
+
+I broke the silence. "Exactly what are you asking, Mr. Hines?"
+
+"File that"--he touched the document--"and forget it. Let Min rest out
+there as my wife, like she ought to have been."
+
+"Why didn't you make her your wife?" thundered the accuser.
+
+Some invisible thing gripped the corded throat of Mr. Hines. "Couldn't,"
+he gulped. "There was--another. She wouldn't divorce me."
+
+"Your sin has found you out," declared the self-constituted judge of the
+dead with a dismal sort of relish.
+
+"Yeh? That's all right. _I'll_ pay for it. But she's paid already."
+
+"As she lived so she has died, in sin," the inexorable voice answered.
+"Let her seek burial elsewhere."
+
+Mr. Hines leaned forward. His expression and tone were passionless as
+those of a statistician proffering a tabulation: his words were fit to
+wring the heart of a stone.
+
+"She's dead, ain't she?" he argued gently. "She can't hurt any one, can
+she? 'Specially if they don't know."
+
+Bartholomew Storrs made a gesture of repulsion.
+
+"Well, who'll she hurt?" pursued the other, in his form of pure and
+abstract reasoning. "Not her mother, I guess. Her mother's waiting for
+her; that's what Min said when she was--was going. And her father'll be
+on the other side of her. And that's all. Min never harmed anybody but
+herself when she was alive. How's she going to do 'em any damage now,
+just lying there, resting? Be reasonable, man!"
+
+Be pitiful, oh, man! For there was a time not so long past when you,
+with all your stern probity and your unwinking conscience, needed pity;
+yes, and pleaded for it when the mind was out of control. Think back,
+Bartholomew Storrs, to the day when you stood by another grave, close to
+that which waits to-day for the weary sleeper--Bartholomew Storrs
+rested, opened the door and stood by it, grimly waiting. Mr. Hines
+turned to me.
+
+"What is this thing, Dominie; a man or a snake? Will I kill it?"
+
+"Bartholomew," I began. "When we--"
+
+"Not a word from you, Dominie. My mind is made up."
+
+"The girl is Isabel Munn's daughter."
+
+I saw a tremor shake the gaunt frame.
+
+"When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her
+grave."
+
+He thrust out a warding hand toward me.
+
+"Why did you weep over Isabel Munn's grave, Bartholomew?"
+
+"Speak no evil of the dead," he cried wildly.
+
+"It is not in my mind. She was a good and pure woman. What would she
+have been if she had listened to you?"
+
+"What do you know? Who betrayed me?"
+
+"You, yourself. When you came down with pneumonia after the burial, I
+sat with you through a night of delirium."
+
+Bartholomew Storrs bowed his head.
+
+"My sin hath found me out," he groaned. "God knows I loved her, and--and
+I hadn't the strength not to tell her. I'd have given up everything for
+her, my hope of heaven, my--my--I 'd have given up my office and gone
+away from God's Acre! And that was twenty years ago. I--I don't sleep o'
+nights yet, for thinking."
+
+"Well, you ain't the only one," said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.
+
+"You're tempting me!" Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him. "You're trying
+to make me false to my trust."
+
+"Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she
+could."
+
+"Don't say it to me!" He beat his head with his clenched hand.
+Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath:
+"I must be guided by my conscience and my God," he said professionally,
+and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the
+latter. A bad sign.
+
+"Isabel Munn's daughter, Bartholomew," I reminded him.
+
+Instead of replying he staggered out of the door. Through the window we
+saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and
+stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.
+
+"Will he do it, do you think?" queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.
+
+I shook my head in doubt. With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can
+never tell.
+
+Old memories are restless companions for the old. So I found them that
+night. But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our
+Square. I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant
+already there.
+
+"We ain't the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie," said Mr.
+Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.
+
+"No? Who else?" Though I suspected, of course.
+
+"Old Gloom. He's over in the Acre."
+
+"Did you meet him there? What did he say?"
+
+"I ducked him. He never saw me. He was--well, I guess he was praying,"
+said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.
+
+"Praying? At the Munn grave?"
+
+"That's it. Groaning and saying, 'A sign, O Lord! Vouchsafe thy servant
+a sign!' Kept saying it over and over."
+
+"For guidance to-morrow," I murmured. "Mr. Hines, I'm not sure that I
+know Bartholomew Storrs's God. Nor can I tell what manner of sign he
+might give, or with what meaning. But if I know my God, whom I believe
+to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him."
+
+"Yeh? You're a good guy, Dominie," said Mr. Hines in his emotionless
+voice.
+
+I took him home with me to sleep. But we did not sleep. We smoked.
+
+Minnie Munn's funeral morning dawned clear and fresh. No word came from
+Bartholomew Storrs. I tried to find him, but without avail.
+
+"We'll go through with it," said Mr. Hines quietly.
+
+How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God's Acre, as the few
+mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn's body; the gravestones like
+petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing
+tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting,
+continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is. Then the grandeur of
+the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth
+in the aged minister's trembling voice, and by it the things which are
+of life were dwarfed to nothingness. But my uneasy mind refused to be
+bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing
+grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and
+waiting. Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign. So, too, did
+Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still
+clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken
+Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.
+
+The sonorous beauty and simplicity of the rite suddenly checked,
+faltered. Bartholomew Storrs leaned over anxiously to the minister. The
+poor, gentle, worn-out old brain was groping now in semi-darkness,
+through which shot a cross-ray of memory. The tremulous voice took on
+new confidence, but the marrow of my spine turned icy as I heard the
+fatally misplaced and confused words that followed:
+
+"If any man know--know just and good cause why this woman--why this
+woman--should not--"
+
+Bartholomew Storrs's gaunt hand shot upward, high in air, outspread in
+the gesture of forbiddance. His deep voice rang, overbearing the
+stumbling accents of the clergyman.
+
+"A sign! A sign from on High! O God, thou hast spoken through thy
+servant to forefend a sore offense. Listen, ye people. This woman--"
+
+He stopped as there rose, on the opposite side of the open grave another
+figure, with hands and voice lifted to heaven in what must surely have
+been the most ingenuous supplication that ever ascended to the throne of
+Pity and Understanding. All the passion which, through the bitter hours,
+had been repressed in the self-commanding soul of the hard and pink Mr.
+Hines, swelled and cried aloud in his plea:
+
+"O God! have a heart!"
+
+Bartholomew Storrs's hand fell. His eyes faltered. His lips trembled. He
+stood once more, agonized with doubt. And in that moment the old
+minister came to his rightful senses.
+
+"Peace, my friends," he commanded with authority. "Let no man disturb
+the peace of the dead."
+
+And, unwaveringly, he went on to the end of the service.
+
+So little Minnie Munn rests beside the mother who waited for her. No
+ghosts have risen to protest her presence there. The man who loved her
+comes back to Our Square from time to time, at which times there are
+fresh flowers on Minnie's mound, below the headstone reading: "Beloved
+Wife of Christopher Hines." But the elegiac verse has never appeared. I
+must record also the disappearance of that tiny bronze cockleshell,
+outward bound for "Far Ports," from the Bonnie Lassie's window, though
+Mr. Hines was wrong in his theory that it could be bought--like all else
+--"at a price." By the way, I believe that he has modified that theory.
+
+As for Bartholomew Storrs, he is prone to take the other side of the
+Square when he sees me on my accustomed bench. In repose his face is as
+grim as ever, but I have seen him smile at a child. Probably the weight
+of our collective sins upon his conscience is less irksome, now that he
+has a crime of his own to balance them. For forgery and falsification of
+an official record is a real crime, which might send him to jail. But
+even that grim and judicial God of his worship ought to welcome him into
+heaven on the strength of it.
+
+I believe that Bartholomew sleeps o' nights now.
+
+
+
+FOR MAYME, READ MARY
+
+I
+
+Mayme Mccartney was a bad little good girl. She inspired (I trust)
+esteem for her goodness. But it was for her hardy and happy impudence,
+her bent for ingenious mischief, her broad and catholic disrespect for
+law, conventions, proprieties and persons, and the glint of the devil in
+her black eyes that we really loved her. Such is the perversity of human
+nature in Our Square. I am told that it is much the same elsewhere.
+
+She first came into public notice by giving (unsolicited) a most
+scandalous and spirited imitation of old Madame Tallafferr, aforetime of
+the Southern aristocracy, in the act of rebuking her landlord, the
+insecticidal Boggs ("Boggs Kills Bugs" in his patent of nobility), for
+eating peanuts on his own front steps. She then (earnestly solicited by
+a growing audience) put on impromptu sketches of the Little Red Doctor
+diagnosing internal complications in a doodle-bug; of MacLachan (drunk)
+singing "The Cork Leg" and MacLachan (sober) repenting thereof; of
+Bartholomew Storrs offering samples of his mortuary poesy to a bereaved
+second-cousin; and, having decked out her chin in cotton-batten whiskers
+(limb of Satan!), of myself proffering sage counsel and pious
+admonitions to Our Square at large. Having concluded, she sat down on a
+bench and coughed. And the Little Red Doctor, who, from the shelter of a
+shrub had observed her presentation of his little idiosyncrasies, drew
+nearer and looked at her hard. For he disliked the sound of that cough.
+He suspected that his old friend and opponent, Death, with whom he
+fought an interminable campaign, was mocking him from ambush. It wasn't
+quite fair play, either, for the foe to use the particular weapon
+indicated by the cough on a mere child. With her lustrous hair loose and
+floating, and her small, eager, flushed face, she looked far short of
+the mature and self-reliant seventeen which was the tally of her
+experienced years.
+
+"Hello," greeted the Little Red Doctor, speaking with the brusque
+informality of one assured of his place as a local celebrity. "I don't
+know you, do I?"
+
+Mayme lifted her eyes. "If you don't," she drawled, "it ain't for lack
+of tryin'. Is your hat glued on?"
+
+"Good Lord!" exclaimed the Little Red Doctor indignantly. "Do you think
+I'm trying to flirt with you? Why, you're only a kid."
+
+"Get up to date," advised Mayme. "I'm old enough to be your steady.
+Only, I'm too lucky."
+
+"That's a bad cough you've got," said the Little Red Doctor hastily.
+
+"I've got a better one at home. Like to hear it some day?"
+
+"Bring it over to my office and let's look at the thing," suggested the
+Little Red Doctor, smiling.
+
+As Mayme McCartney observed that smile with the shrewd judgment of men
+which comes early, in self-protection, to girls of her environment, the
+suspicion and impudence died out of her face, which became wistful.
+
+"D'you think it means anything?" she asked.
+
+"Any cough means something. I couldn't tell without examination."
+
+"How much?" inquired the cautious Mayme.
+
+The Little Red Doctor is a willing liar in a good cause. "No charge for
+first consultation. Come over to my office."
+
+When the test was finished, the Little Red Doctor looked professionally
+non-committal. "Live with your parents?" he asked.
+
+"No. With my aunt. 'Round in the Avenue."
+
+"Where do you work?"
+
+"The Emporium," answered the girl, naming the great and still
+fashionable downtown department store, half a mile to the westward.
+
+"You ought to quit. As soon as possible."
+
+"And spoil my delicate digestion?"
+
+"Who said anything about your digestion?"
+
+"I did. If I quit workin', I quit eatin'. And that's bad for me. I tried
+it once."
+
+"I see," said the Little Red Doctor, recognizing a condition by no means
+unprecedented in local practice. "Couldn't you get a job in some
+better climate?"
+
+"Where, for instance?"
+
+"Well, if you knew any one in California."
+
+"How's the walkin'?" asked Mayme.
+
+"It's long," replied the Little Red Doctor, "seeing" again. "Anyway,
+you've got to have fresh air."
+
+"They serve it fresh, every morning, right here in Our Square," Mayme
+pointed out.
+
+"Good idea. Get up early and fill your lungs full of it for an hour
+every day." He gave some further instructions.
+
+Mayme produced a dollar, and delicately placed it on the mantel.
+
+"Take it away," said the Little Red Doctor. "Didn't I tell you--"
+
+"Go-wan!" said Mayme. "Whadda you think you are; Bellevue Hospital? I
+pay as I go, Doc."
+
+The Little Red Doctor frowned austerely.
+
+"What's the matter? Face hurt you?" asked the solicitous Mayme.
+
+"People don't call me 'Doc,'" began the offended practitioner in
+dignified tones.
+
+"Oh, that's because they ain't on to you," she assured him. "I wouldn't
+call you 'Doc' myself if I didn't know you was a good sport back of
+your bluff."
+
+The Little Red Doctor grinned, looking first at Mayme and then at the
+dollar. "You aren't such a bad sport yourself," he admitted. "Well,
+we'll call this a deal. But if I see you in the Square and give you a
+tip about yourself now and again, that doesn't count. That's on the
+side. Understand?"
+
+She considered it gravely. "All right," she agreed at length. "Between
+pals, yes? Shake, Doc."
+
+So began the quaint friendship between our hard-worked, bluff,
+knightly-hearted practitioner, and the impish and lovable little
+store-girl. Also another of the innumerable tilts between him and his
+old friend, Death.
+
+"He's got the jump on me, Dominie," complained the Little Red Doctor to
+me. "But, at that, we're going to give him a fight. She's clear grit,
+that youngster is. She's got a philosophy of life, too. I don't know
+where she got it, or just what it is, but it's there. Oh, she's worth
+saving, Dominie."
+
+"If I hadn't reason to think you safeguarded, my young friend," said I,
+"I'd give you solemn warning."
+
+"Why, she's an infant!" returned the Little Red Doctor scornfully. "A
+poor, little, monkey-faced child. Besides--" He stopped and sighed.
+
+"Yes; I know," I assented. There was at that time a "Besides" in the
+Little Red Doctor's sorrowful heart which bulked too large to admit of
+any rivalry. "Nevertheless," I added, "you needn't be so scornful about
+the simian type in woman. It's a concentrated peril to mankind. I've
+seen trouble caused in this world by kitten faces, by pure, classic
+faces, by ox-eyed-Juno faces, by vivid blond faces, by dreamy, poetic
+faces, by passionate Southern faces, but for real power of catastrophe,
+for earthquake and eclipse, for red ruin and the breaking up of laws,
+commend me to the humanized, feminized monkey face. I'll wager that when
+Antony first set eyes on Cleopatra, he said, 'And which cocoa palm did
+she fall out of?' Phryne was of the beautified baboon cast of features,
+and as for Helen of Troy, the best authorities now lean to the belief
+that the face that launched a thousand ships and fired the topless
+towers of Ilium was a reversion to the arboreal. I tell you, man that is
+born of woman cannot resist it. Give little Mayme three more years--"
+
+"I wish to God I could," said the Little Red Doctor.
+
+"Can't you?" I asked, startled. "Is it as bad as that?"
+
+"It isn't much better. How's your insomnia, Dominie?"
+
+"Insomnia," said I, "is a scientific quibble for unlaid memories. I take
+mine out for the early morning air at times, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It is. Keep an eye on the kid, and do what you can to prevent that busy
+little mind of hers from brooding."
+
+In that way Mayme McCartney and I became early morning friends. She
+adopted for her special own a bench some rods from mine under the lilac
+near the fountain. After her walk, taken with her thin shoulders flung
+back and the chest filling with deep, slow breaths, she would pay me a
+call or await one from me and we would exchange theories and opinions
+and argue about this and other worlds. Seventy against seventeen. Fair
+exchange, for, if mine were the riper creed, hers was the more vivid and
+adventurous. Who shall say which was the sounder?
+
+On the morning of the astonishing Trespass, I was late, being
+discouraged by a light rain. As she approached her bench, she found it
+occupied by an individual who appeared to be playing a contributory part
+in the general lamentation of nature. The interloper was young and quite
+exquisite of raiment, which alone would have marked him for an
+outlander. His elbows were propped on his knees, his fists supported his
+cheekbones, his whole figure was in a slump of misery. Scrutinizing him
+with surprise, Mayme was shocked to see a glistening drop, detached from
+his drooping countenance, fall to the pavement, followed by another. At
+the same time she heard an unmistakable and melancholic sound.
+
+The benches in Our Square have seen more life than most. They have
+cradled weariness of body and spirit; they have assuaged grief and given
+refuge to shaking terror, and been visited by Death. They have shivered
+to the passion of cursing men and weeping women. But never before had
+any of their ilk heard grown young manhood blubber. Neither had Mayme
+McCartney. It inspired her with mingled emotions, the most immediate of
+which was a desire to laugh.
+
+Accordingly she laughed. The intruder lifted a woeful face, gave her one
+vague look, and reverted to his former posture. Mayme stopped laughing.
+She advanced and put a friendly hand on one of the humped shoulders.
+
+"Cheer up, Buddy," she said. "It ain't as bad as you think it is."
+
+"It's worse," gulped a choky voice. Then the head lifted again. "Who are
+you?" it demanded.
+
+"I'm your big sister," said Mayme reassuringly. "Tell a feller about
+it."
+
+The response was neither polite nor explanatory. "D---n sisters!" said
+the bencher.
+
+"Oh, tutt-_tutt_ and naughty-naughty!" rebuked Mayme. "Somebody's sister
+been puttin' somethin' over on poor little Willy?"
+
+"My own sister has." He was in that state of semi-hysterical exhaustion
+in which revelation of one's intimate troubles to the first comer seems
+natural. "She's gone and got arrested," he wailed.
+
+Mayme's face became grave and practical.
+
+"That's different," said she. "What's her lay?"
+
+"Lay? I don't know--"
+
+"What's her line? What's she done to get pinched?"
+
+"Shoplifting. At the special night sale of the Emporium."
+
+"You're tellin' me! In the silks, huh?"
+
+"What do you know about it? My God! Is it in the papers already?"
+
+"Keep your hair on, Buddy. I work there, and I heard about that pinch.
+Swell young married lady. Say," she added, after a thoughtful pause:
+"has she got somethin' comin'?"
+
+"Something coming? How? What?"
+
+"Don't be dumb. A kid."
+
+He stared. She was looking at him with unabashed frankness. Those who
+live in the close, rough intimacy of the slums do not cherish false
+shame about the major facts of life.
+
+"Suppose she has?" queried the youth sulkily.
+
+"Why, that'll be all right, you poor boob," returned the kindly Mayme.
+"The judge'll let her off with a warning."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"They always do. Those cases are common. Dolan ought to be canned for
+makin' a pinch of a lady in the fam'ly way."
+
+"What if they do let her off?" lamented the youth. "It'll be in all the
+papers and I'll be ruined. My life's spoiled. I might as well leave
+the city."
+
+"Ah, don't do a mean trick like that to the old town!" besought the
+sardonic Mayme. "Where do you come in to get hurt?"
+
+He burst into the hectic grievances of the pampered and spoiled child.
+His family was just getting a foothold in Society (with an almost holy
+emphasis on the word) and now they were disgraced. All was up. Their
+new, precariously held acquaintances would drop them. In his petulant
+grief he did an amazing thing; he produced a bunch of clippings from the
+local society columns, setting forth, in the printed company of the
+Shining Ones, the doings (mostly charitable) of Mrs. Samuel Berthelin,
+her daughter, Mrs. Harris, and her son, David, referred to glowingly as
+"the scion of the wealth and position of the late lamented financier."
+
+Mayme was impressed. Like most shop-girls she was a fervent reader of
+society news. (If shop-girls did not read this fine flower of American
+democracy, nobody would, except those who wait eagerly and anxiously for
+their names to appear.) She perceived--not knowing that the advertising
+leverage of the Berthelin Loan Agency had forced those insecure portals
+of print for the entry of Mrs. Berthelin and her progeny--that she was
+in the presence of the Great. Capacity for awe was not in Mayme's
+independent soul. But she was interested and sympathetic. Here was a
+career worth saving!
+
+"Let's go over to the station-house," said she. "I know some of the
+cops."
+
+To the white building with the green lanterns they went. The shoplifting
+case, it appeared, had already been bailed out. Furthermore, everything
+would be all right and there was little fear of publicity; the store
+itself would see to that. Vastly relieved and refreshed in spirit, David
+Berthelin began to take stock of his companion with growing interest.
+She was decidedly not pretty. Just as decidedly she was quaint and
+piquant and quite new to his jejune but also somewhat bored experience.
+From the opening passage of their first conversation he deduced, lacking
+the insight to discriminate between honest frankness and immodesty, that
+she was a "fly kid." On that theory he invited her to breakfast with
+him. Mayme accepted. They went to Thomson's Élite Restaurant, on the
+corner, where David roused mingled awe and misgivings in the breast of
+Polyglot Elsa, the cashier, by ordering champagne, and Mayme reassured
+her by declining it.
+
+Thus began an acquaintanceship which swiftly ripened into a queer sort
+of intimacy, more than a little disturbing to us of Our Square who were
+interested in Mayme. Young Berthelin's over-ornate roadster lingered in
+our quiet precincts more often than appeared to us suitable or safe, and
+black-eyed Mayme, looking demure and a little exalted, was whirled away
+to unknown worlds, always returning, however, at respectable hours. When
+the Little Red Doctor remonstrated with her ostensibly on the score of
+her health, she reminded him in one breath that he hadn't been invited
+to censor her behavior which was entirely her own affair, and in the
+next--with his hand caught between hers and her voice low and
+caressing--declared that he was the best little old Doc in the world and
+there was nothing to worry about, either as to health or conduct.
+Indeed, her condition seemed to be improving. I dare say young Mr.
+Berthelin's expensive food was one of the things she needed.
+Furthermore, she ceased to be the raggle-taggle, hoydenishly clad Mayme
+of the cash department, and, having been promoted to saleswoman, quite
+went in for dress. On this point she sought the advice of the Bonnie
+Lassie. The result went far to justify my prophecy that Mayme's queer
+little face might yet make its share of trouble in an impressionable
+world. But the Bonnie Lassie shook her bonnie head privately and said
+that the fine-feathers development was a bad sign, and that if young
+Berthelin would obligingly run his seventeen-jeweled roadster off the
+Williamsburgh Bridge, with himself in it, much trouble might be saved
+for all concerned.
+
+If little Mayme were headed for trouble, she went to meet it with a
+smiling face. Never had she seemed so joyous, so filled with the desire
+of life. This much was to be counted on the credit side, the Little Red
+Doctor said. On the debit side--well, to me was deputed the unwelcome
+task of conveying the solemn, and, as it were, official protest and
+warning of Our Square. Of course I did it at the worst possible moment.
+It was early one morning, when Mayme, on her bench, was looking a little
+hollow-eyed and disillusioned. I essayed the light and jocular approach
+to the subject:
+
+"Well, Mayme; how is the ardent swain?"
+
+She turned to me with the old flash in her big, shadowed eyes: "Did you
+say swain or swine, Dominie?"
+
+"Ah!" said I. "Has he changed his rôle?"
+
+"He's given himself away, if that's what you mean."
+
+"I thought that would come."
+
+"He--he wanted me to take a trip to Boston with him."
+
+I considered this bit of information, which was not as surprising or
+unexpected as Mayme appeared to deem it. "Have you told the Little
+Red Doctor?"
+
+"Doc'd kill him," said Mayme simply.
+
+"What better reason for telling?"
+
+"Oh, the poor kid: he don't know any better."
+
+"Doesn't he? In any case I trust that you know better, after this, than
+to have anything more to do with him."
+
+"Yep. I've cut him out," replied Mayme listlessly. "I figured you and
+Doc were right, Dominie. It's no good, his kind of game. Not for girls
+like me." She looked up at me with limpid eyes, in which there was
+courage and determination and suffering.
+
+"My dear," I murmured, "I hope it isn't going to be too hard."
+
+"He's so pretty," said Mayme McCartney wistfully.
+
+So he was, now that I came to think of it. With his clear, dark color,
+his wavy hair, his languishing brown eyes, his almost girlishly graceful
+figure, and his beautiful clothes, he was pretty enough to fascinate any
+inexperienced imagination. But I cannot say that he looked pretty when,
+a few days later, he invaded Our Square in search of a Mayme who had
+vanished beyond his ken (she had kept her tenement domicile a secret
+from him), and, addressing me as "you white-whiskered old goat," accused
+me of having come between him and the girl upon whom he had deigned to
+bestow his lordly favor. Unfortunately for him, the Little Red Doctor
+chanced along just then and inquired, none too deferentially, what the
+Scion of Wealth and Position was doing in that quarter.
+
+"What business is it of yours, Red-Head?" countered the offended
+visitor.
+
+He then listened with distaste, but perforce (for what else could he do
+in the grasp of a man of twice his power?), to a brilliant and
+convincing summary of his character, terminating in a withering sketch
+of his personal and sartorial appearance.
+
+"I didn't mean the kid any harm," argued the Scion suavely. "I--I came
+back to apologize."
+
+"Let me catch you snooping around here again and I'll break every bone
+in your body," the Little Red Doctor answered him.
+
+"I guess this Square's free to everybody. I guess you don't own it,"
+said the youth, retreating to his car.
+
+Notwithstanding the unimpeachable exactitude of this surmise, he was
+seen no more in that locality. Judge, then, of our dismay, locally, at
+learning, not a fortnight later, from a fellow employee of Mayme's, that
+she had been met at closing time by a swell young guy in a
+cherry-colored rattler, who took her away to dine with him. Catechized
+upon the point, later on, by a self-appointed committee of two
+consisting of the Little Red Doctor and myself, Mayme said vaguely that
+it was all right; we didn't understand. This is, I believe, the usual
+formula. The last half of it at least, was true.
+
+About that time we, in common with the rest of the Nation, took that
+upon our minds which was even more important than Mayme McCartney's love
+affair. War loomed imminently before us. It was only a question of the
+fitting time to strike; and Our Square was feverishly reckoning up its
+military capacity. The great day of the declaration came. The Nation had
+drawn the sword. In the week following, Our Square was invaded.
+
+She descended upon us from the somber sumptuousness of a gigantic
+limousine, the majestic, the imposing, the formidable, the authoritative
+Mrs. S. Berthelin. We knew at once who she was, because she led, by the
+ear, as it were, her hopeful progeny, young David. I do not mean that
+she had an actual auricular grip on him, but the effect upon his
+woe-begone and brow-beaten person was the same. He suggested vividly a
+spoiled and pretty lapdog being sternly conveyed to a detested bath. She
+suggested a vivified bouquet of artificial flowers. We hastily rallied
+our forces to meet her; the Little Red Doctor, the Bonnie Lassie, and
+myself. Mrs. Berthelin opened her exordium in a tone of high philippic,
+not even awaiting the formalities of introduction. But when I insisted
+upon these, and she learned that the Bonnie Lassie was Mrs. Cyrus
+Staten, she cringed. Despite a desire to keep out of the society columns
+quite as genuine as that of Mrs. Berthelin's to get in, the Cyrus
+Statens frequently figure among the Shining Ones, a fact almost
+painfully appreciated by our visitor. After that it was easy to get her
+into the Bonnie Lassie's house, where her eloquence could not draw a
+crowd. To get young David there was not quite so easy. He made one
+well-timed and almost successful effort to bolt, and even evinced signs
+of balking on the steps.
+
+His punishment was awaiting him. No sooner were we all settled in the
+Bonnie Lassie's studio than the mother proceeded to regale us with a
+history and forecast of his career, beginning with his precocious infant
+lispings and terminating with his projected, though wholly indefinite,
+marriage into the Highest Social Circles. To do David justice,
+he squirmed.
+
+"Have you got him a job as a general in the army yet, ma'am?" inquired
+the Little Red Doctor suavely.
+
+It was quite lost upon Mrs. Berthelin. She informed us that a commission
+as Captain in the Quartermaster's Department was arranged for, and she
+expected to have the young officer assigned to New York so that he could
+live at home in the comfort and luxury suitable to his wealth and
+condition. And what she wanted us to understand clearly was that no
+designing little gutter-snipe was to be allowed to compromise David's
+future. She concluded with an imaginative and most unflattering estimate
+of Mayme McCartney's character, manners, and morals, in the midst of
+which I heard a gasp.
+
+It came from Mayme, standing, wide-eyed and white, in the doorway. The
+front door had been left ajar, and, seeing the Berthelins' monogrammed
+car outside, she had come in. The oratress turned and stared.
+
+"That's a lie," said Mayme McCartney steadily. "I'm as straight a girl
+as your own daughter. Ask him."
+
+She pointed to the stricken David. Pointing may not be ladylike, but it
+can be extremely effective. David's head dropped into his hands.
+
+"Oh, Ma!" he groaned.
+
+"Don't call me 'Ma,'" snapped the goaded Mrs. Berthelin. "And this is
+the girl?" She looked Mayme up and down. Mayme did the same by her and
+did it better.
+
+"I could give you a lorny-yette and beat you at the frozen-stare trick,"
+said the irrepressible Mayme at the conclusion of the duel which ended
+in her favor.
+
+The Little Red Doctor gurgled. I saw the Bonnie Lassie's eyelids quiver,
+but her face was cold and impassive as she turned to the visitor.
+
+"Mrs. Berthelin," said she, "you have made some very damaging
+statements, before witnesses, about Miss McCartney's character. What
+proof have you?"
+
+"Why, he wants to _marry_ her!" almost yelled the mother. "She's trapped
+him."
+
+"That's another lie," said Mayme.
+
+"He told me himself that he was going to marry you."
+
+"Did he? Then he's wrong. I wouldn't marry him with a brass ring,"
+asserted Mayme.
+
+"You wouldn't mar--You wouldn't _what_?" demanded the mother, outraged
+and incredulous.
+
+"You heard me. He knows it, too. I don't like the family--what I've seen
+of them," observed Mayme judicially. "Besides, he's yellow."
+
+David's shamed face emerged into view. "I'm not," he gulped. "She--she
+made me."
+
+"Captain!" said Mayme with a searing scorn in her voice.
+"Quartermaster's Department! Safety first! When half the little
+fifteen-per tape-snippers in the Emporium are breakin' their
+fourteen-inch necks volunteerin' early and often to get where the
+fightin' is."
+
+David Berthelin stood on his feet, and his pretty face wore an ugly
+expression.
+
+"Let me out of here," he growled.
+
+"David!" said his mother. "Where are you going?"
+
+"To enlist."
+
+"Davey!" It was a shriek. "You shan't."
+
+"I will."
+
+"I won't let you."
+
+"You can go to--"
+
+"Buddy!" Mayme's voice, magically softened, broke in. "Cut out the rough
+stuff. You better go home and think it over. Bein' a private is no
+pink-silk picnic."
+
+"I'd rather see a son of mine dead than a common soldier!" cried Mrs.
+Berthelin.
+
+The Bonnie Lassie, very white, rose. "You must leave this house," she
+said. "At once. Think yourself fortunate that I cannot bring myself to
+betray a guest. Otherwise I should report you to the authorities."
+
+Young David addressed Mayme in the words and tone of a misunderstood and
+aggrieved pet. "You think I'm no good. I'll show you, Mayme. Wait till I
+come back--if I ever do come back--and you'll be sorry."
+
+"Hero stuff," commented the Little Red Doctor. "It'll all have oozed out
+of his fingertips this time to-morrow."
+
+"Will you show me a place to enlist?" challenged the boy. "And," he
+added with a malicious grin, "will you enlist with me?"
+
+"Sure!" said the Little Red Doctor. "I'll show you. But they won't take
+me." He bestowed a bitter glance on his twisted foot. "Come along."
+
+They went off together, while Mrs. Berthelin scandalized Our Square by
+an exhibition of hysterics involving language not at all in accord with
+the rich respectability of her apparel and her limousine.
+
+We waited at the Bonnie Lassie's for the Little Red Doctor's return. He
+came back alone. I thought that I detected a pathetic little gleam of
+disappointment in Mayme's deep eyes.
+
+"He's done it," said the Little Red Doctor. And I was sorry for him, so
+much was there of tragic envy in his face.
+
+"Did you give him your blessing?" I asked.
+
+"I did. He shook hands like a man. There's maybe something in that boy,
+if it weren't for the old hell-cat of a mother. However, she won't have
+much chance. He's off to-morrow."
+
+"Will he write?" said Mayme in a curious, strained voice.
+
+"He will. He'll report to me from time to time."
+
+"Didn't he--wasn't there any message?"
+
+"Just good-bye and good luck," answered the Little Red Doctor, censoring
+ruthlessly.
+
+The Bonnie Lassie went over and put her arms around Mayme McCartney.
+
+"My dear," she said softly. "It wouldn't do. It really wouldn't. He
+isn't worth it. You're going to forget him."
+
+"All right." Suddenly Mayme looked like a very helpless and sorrowful
+little girl. "Only, it--it isn't goin' to be as easy as you think. He
+was so pretty," said Mayme McCartney wistfully.
+
+
+II
+
+Summer was smiting Our Square with white-hot bolts of sun-fire, from
+which one could scarcely find refuge beneath the scraggly shelter of
+parched shrubbery, when one morning the Bonnie Lassie approached my
+bench with a fell and purposeful smile.
+
+"Dominie, you're a dear old thing," she began in her most insinuating
+tones.
+
+"I won't do it," I said determinedly, foreboding something serious.
+
+The Bonnie Lassie raised her eyebrows at me, affecting aggrieved
+innocence. "Won't do what?" she inquired.
+
+"Whatever it is that you're trying to wheedle me into."
+
+The eyebrows resumed their normal arch, and a dimple flickered in the
+corner of the soft lips. By this I knew that the case was hopeless. "Oh,
+but you've already done it," she said.
+
+"Help! Tell me the worst and get it over with."
+
+"It must be lovely to be rich," said the Bonnie Lassie meditatively.
+"And so generous!"
+
+"How much is it? What do you want it for? I haven't got that much," I
+hastily remarked.
+
+"And to keep it an absolute secret from everybody. Even from Mayme
+herself."
+
+"Go on. Don't mind me," I murmured.
+
+"The Little Red Doctor has found the place. It's in New Mexico. And in
+the fall she's going on to the Coast. He's almost willing to guarantee
+that a year of it will make her as strong as ever. And the hundred
+dollars a month you allow her besides her traveling expenses will be
+plenty. You _are_ a good old thing, Dominie!"
+
+"What you mean is that I'm an old good-thing. How shall I look," I
+demanded bitterly, "when Mayme comes to thank me?"
+
+"No foolisher than you do now, trying to raise unreasonable objections
+to our perfectly good plans," retorted the Bonnie Lassie. "Besides, she
+won't. She knows that your way is to do good by stealth and blush to
+find it fame, and she's under pledge to pretend to know nothing
+about it."
+
+"Where did the Little Red Doctor raise it?" I queried.
+
+"There are times, Dominie, when your mind has real penetrative power.
+Think it over."
+
+"The Weeping Scion of Wealth and Position!" I cried. "Did our medical
+friend blackmail him?"
+
+"Not necessarily. He only dropped a hint that Mayme's chance here was
+rather poorer than a soldier's going to war, unless something could be
+done and the Weeping Scion fairly begged to be allowed to do it. 'Do you
+think she'd take it from you?' said the Little Red Doctor, 'after what
+your mother called her?' 'Don't let her know,' says our ornamental young
+weeper. 'Tell her somebody else is doing it. Tell her it's from that
+white-whiskered old--from the elderly and handsome gentleman with the
+benevolent expres--'"
+
+"Yes: I know," I broke in. "Very good. I'm the goat. Lying, hypocrisy,
+false pretense, fake charity; it's all one to a sin-seared old reprobate
+like me. After it's over I'll go around the corner and steal what
+pennies I can find in Blind Simon's cup, just to make me feel
+comparatively respectable and decent again."
+
+It was no easier than I expected it to be, especially when little Mayme,
+having come to say good-bye, put her lips close to my ear and tried to
+whisper something, and cried and kissed me instead.
+
+Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left. But her letters
+helped. They were so exactly like herself! Even at the first, when
+things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and
+quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square,
+which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and
+best people in it. Homesickness! Poor little, lonely Mayme. She was
+reading--she wrote the Bonnie Lassie--all the books that the Dominie had
+listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue
+goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort. "Why grow up a
+Boob," wrote the philosophic Mayme, "when the lil old world is full of
+wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?"
+
+Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views
+on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with
+distinctly less of spirit.
+
+"It appears," reported the Little Red Doctor, "that every man in his own
+company has licked our young friend and now the other companies of the
+regiment are beginning to show interest, and he doesn't like it. I
+believe he'd desert if it weren't that he's afraid of what Mayme
+would think."
+
+"Still on his mind, is she?" I asked.
+
+The Little Red Doctor produced a letter with a camp postmark from the
+South and read a passage:
+
+"You were right when you guessed that I never wanted anything very much
+before, without having it handed to me. Perhaps you are right about its
+being good for me. But it comes hard. The promise goes, of course. I'm
+going to show you and her that I'm not yellow. [So that was still
+rankling; salutary, if bitter dose!] But if this war ever finishes, all
+bets are off and I'm coming back to find her. And don't you forget your
+part of the bargain, to write and let me know how she is getting on."
+The Little Red Doctor was able to send progressively encouraging news.
+When the cold weather came, Mayme moved westward to Southern California,
+and found herself on the edge of one of the strange, tumultuous,
+semi-insane moving-picture colonies of that region. Thence issued,
+presently, stirring tidings.
+
+"What do you think?" wrote our exile. "They've got my funny little
+monkey mug in the movies. Five per and steady work. The director likes
+me and says he will give me a real chance one of these days. But, as the
+Dominie would say, this is a hell of a place. [Graceless imp!] I would
+not say it myself, because I am a perfect lady. You have to be, out
+here. That reminds me: I have cut out the Mayme. Every fresh little
+frizzle in the colony with a false front and a pneumatic figure calls
+herself Mayme or Daisye or Tootsye. Not for me! I am keeping up my
+lessons and trying to make my head good for something besides carrying a
+switch. Tell the Little Red Doctor that it is so long since I coughed I
+have forgotten how. And I love you all so hard that it _hurts_.
+
+"Your loving
+
+"MARY MCCARTNEY
+
+"P.S. I am going to be Marie Courtenay when I get my name up in the
+pictures. Put that in the Directory and see how it looks.
+
+"P.S.2. How is my soldier boy getting along? Poor kid! I expect he is
+finding it a lot different from Broadway with money in your pocket."
+
+About this time the Weeping Scion was finding things very different,
+indeed, from Broadway, having been shifted to a specially wet and muddy
+section of France; and was taking them as he found them. That is to say,
+he had learned the prime lesson of war.
+
+"And he's been made corporal," announced the Little Red Doctor with
+satisfaction.
+
+"That sounds encouraging," remarked the Bonnie Lassie. "How did it
+happen?"
+
+"He went over on one of the 'flu ships,' and when the epidemic began to
+mow 'em down there was a kind of panic. From what I can make out, the
+Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good. A corporal's stripes
+aren't much, but they're something."
+
+Better was to come. There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor's
+expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young
+David's promotion to a sergeantcy.
+
+"While it's very gratifying," I remarked, "it doesn't seem to me an
+epoch-making event."
+
+"Doesn't it!" retorted my friend. "That's because of your abysmal
+military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A
+fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a
+colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but
+to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you've got to show the
+_stuff_. You've got to be a _man_. You've got to have--"
+
+"Are you going to tell her?" interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been
+sent for to share the news.
+
+The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave. "She's another matter," he
+said. "I don't think I shall."
+
+Matters were going forward with Mayme--beg her pardon, Mary McCartney,
+too.
+
+"Better and more of it," she wrote the Bonnie Lassie. "They rang me in
+on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue. Was I a hit?
+Say, I got more flowers than a hearse! You've got to remember, though,
+that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here. And the local stock
+company has made me an offer. Ingenue parts. There is not the money that
+I might get in the pictures, but the chance is better. So Marie
+Courtenay moves on to the legit.--I mean the spoken drama. Look out for
+me on Broadway later!"
+
+In the correspondence from Sergeant Berthelin there came a long hiatus
+followed by a curt bit of official information: "Seriously wounded." The
+Little Red Doctor brought the news to me, with a queer expression on
+his face.
+
+"It doesn't look good, Dominie," he said. "You know, my old friend,
+Death, is a shrewd picker. He's got an eye for men." He mused, rubbing
+his tousled, brickish locks with a nervous hand. "I was getting to kind
+of like that young pup," he muttered moodily.
+
+The saying that no news is good news was surely concocted by some one
+who never chafed through day after lengthening day for that which does
+not come. But in the end it did come, in the form of a scrawl from the
+Weeping Scion himself. He was mending, but very slowly, and they said it
+would be a long time--months, perhaps--before he could get back to the
+front. Meantime, they were still picking odds and ends, chiefly
+metallic, out of various parts of his system.
+
+"I'm one of the guys you read about that came over here to collect
+souvenirs," he commented. "Well, I've got all I need of 'em. They can
+have the rest. All I want now is to get back and present a few to
+Fritzie before the show is over."
+
+Thereafter the Little Red Doctor exhibited, but read to us only in small
+parts, quite bulky communications from overseas. Some of them, it became
+known, he was forwarding to our little Mary, out in the Far West. With
+her answer came the solution.
+
+"Some of the 'Grass and Asphalt' sketches are wonders; some not so good.
+I am going to try out 'Doggy' if I can find a poodle with enough
+intelligence to support me. But you need not have been so mysterious,
+Doc, about your 'young amateur writer who seems to have some talent.'
+Did you think I would not know it was David? Why, bless your dear, silly
+heart, I told him some of those stories myself. But how does he get a
+chance to write them? Is he back on this side? Or is he invalided? Or
+what? Tell me. I want to know about him. You do not have to worry about
+my--well, my infatuation for him, any more. He was a pretty boy, though,
+wasn't he? But I have seen too many of that kind in the picture game.
+I'm spoiled for them. How I would love to smear some of their pretty,
+smirky faces! They give me a queer feeling in my breakfast. Excuse me: I
+forgot I was a lady. But don't say 'pretty' to me any more. I'm through.
+At that, you were all wrong about Buddy. He was a lot decenter than you
+thought: only he was brought up wrong. Give him my love as one pal to
+another. I hope he don't come back a He-ro. I'm offen he-roes, too.
+Excuse again!"
+
+Wars and exiles alike come to an end in time. And in time our two
+wanderers returned, but Mary first, David having been sent into Germany
+with the Army of Occupation. Modest announcements in the theatrical
+columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie
+Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in
+the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the
+production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new
+actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her.
+Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain
+indefinable and winningly individual quality. The critics discussed it
+gravely and at length, differing argumentatively as to its nature and
+constitution. I could have given them a hint. My predictions regarding
+the ancestral potencies of the monkey-face were being abundantly
+justified.
+
+No announcements, even of the most modest description, heralded the
+arrival of Sergeant Major (if you please!) David Berthelin upon his
+native shores. He came at once to Our Square and tackled the Little
+Red Doctor.
+
+"Where is she?" he asked.
+
+The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise. "Have you
+still got _that_ bee in your bonnet?" said he.
+
+"Where is she?" repeated the Weeping Scion.
+
+Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see
+the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and
+reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were
+less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their
+corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion
+by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was
+brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid's-bow of his mouth had
+straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His
+manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom
+aforetime he had stigmatized as a "white-whiskered old goat," he now
+addressed as "Sir."
+
+"Perhaps _you'll_ tell me where she is, sir," said he patiently.
+
+"Leave it to me," said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst
+for the dramatic in real life. "And keep next Sunday night open."
+
+She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at
+her studio, of David's "Doggy" from the "Grass and Asphalt" sketches
+which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little
+conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as
+expressed to his waif of a dog. For the supporting part we borrowed
+Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played
+it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right
+places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and
+only rehearsal). After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a
+check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the
+time to settle accounts, but she never could repay--and so forth and so
+on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might
+accept the thanks if not the check. Instead of which I blurted out
+the truth.
+
+"Oh, _Dominie_!" said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank
+within me. "Do you think that was fair? Don't you know that I never
+could have taken the money?"
+
+"Precisely. And we had to find a way to make you take it. We couldn't
+have you dying on the premises," I argued with a feeble attempt at
+jocularity.
+
+"But from _him_!" she said. "After what had happened--And his mother.
+How could you let me do it!"
+
+"I thought you would have gotten over that feeling by this time," I
+ventured.
+
+"Oh, there's none of the old feeling left," she answered, so simply that
+I knew she believed her own statement. "But to have lived on his
+money--Where is he?" she asked abruptly.
+
+I told her that also and about Sunday night; the whole thing. The Bonnie
+Lassie would have slain me. But I couldn't help it. I was feeling
+rather abject.
+
+Sunday night came, and with it Miss Marie Courtenay, escorted by an
+"ace" covered with decorations, whose name is a household word and who
+was only too obviously her adoring slave. Already there had been hints
+of their engagement. Had I been that ace, I should have felt no small
+discomposure at the sight of the girl's face when she first saw the
+changed and matured Weeping Scion of three years before. After the first
+flash of recognition she had developed on that expressive face of hers a
+look of wonder and almost pathetic questioning, and, I thought, who knew
+and loved the child, already something deeper and sweeter. Young David,
+after greeting the star of the evening, took a modest rear seat as
+befitted his rank. But when the Bonnie Lassie announced "Doggy," it was
+his face that was the study.
+
+Of that performance I shall say nothing. It is now famous and familiar
+to thousands of theater-goers. But if ever mortal man spent twenty
+minutes in fairyland, it was David, while Mary was playing the work of
+his fancy. At the close, he disappeared. I suppose he did not dare trust
+himself to join in the congratulations with which she was overwhelmed. I
+found him, as I rather expected, on the bench where he had sat when
+Mayme McCartney first found him. And when the crowd had departed from
+the studio, I told the girl. Without even stopping to put on her hat she
+went out to him.
+
+He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his
+cheekbones. But this time he was not weeping. He was thinking. Just as
+of old she put a hand on his humped shoulder. Startled, he looked up,
+and jumped to his feet. She was holding something out to him.
+
+"What's that?" he said.
+
+"A check. For what I owe you."
+
+"Who told you? The Little Red Doctor promised--"
+
+"He's kept his promise. The Dominie told me."
+
+"Oh! I suppose," he said slowly, "I've got to take this. You
+wouldn't--no, of course you wouldn't," he sighed.
+
+"I've tried to keep strict account," she said.
+
+David adopted a matter-of-fact tone. "I can't deny that it'll come in
+handy, just now," he remarked. "At the present price of clothing, and
+with my personal exchequer in its depleted state--"
+
+"Why," she broke in, "has anything happened? Your mother--?"
+
+"Cut off," said David briefly.
+
+"She's cut you off? On my account? Oh--"
+
+"No. I've cut her off. Temporarily. She doesn't want me to work. I'm
+working. On a newspaper."
+
+"That's good," said the girl warmly. "Let's sit down."
+
+They sat down. Each, however, found it curiously hard to begin again.
+Mary was aching to thank him, but had a dreadful fear that if she tried
+to, she would cry. She didn't want to cry. She had a feeling that crying
+would be a highly unstrategic procedure leading to possible alarming
+developments. Why didn't David say something? Finally he did make a
+beginning.
+
+"Mayme."
+
+"No: not 'Mayme' any more."
+
+He flushed to his temples. "I beg your pardon, Miss Courtenay."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said softly. "Mary. I've discarded the 'Mayme' long
+ago."
+
+"Mary," he repeated in a tone of musing content.
+
+"Buddy."
+
+He caught his breath. "A few thousand of the best guys in the world," he
+said, "call a fellow that. And every time they said it, it made my heart
+ache with longing to hear it in your voice."
+
+"You're a queer Buddy," returned the girl, not quite steadily. "Did you
+bring me home a German helmet for a souvenir?"
+
+He shook his head. "I didn't bring home much of anything, except some
+experience and the discovery of the fact that when I had to stand on my
+own feet, I wasn't much."
+
+"You got your stripes, didn't you?" suggested the girl.
+
+"That's all I did get," he returned jealously. "I didn't get any medal,
+or palms or decorations or crosses of war: I didn't get anything except
+an occasional calling down and a few scratches. If I'd had the luck to
+get into aviation or some of the fancy branches--" David checked
+himself. "There I go," he said in self-disgust. "Beefing again."
+
+It was quite in the old, spoiled-child tone; an echo of indestructible
+personality, the Weeping Scion of other days; and it went straight to
+Mary's swelling, bewildered, groping heart. She began to laugh and a sob
+tangled itself in the laughter, and she choked and said:
+
+"Buddy."
+
+He turned toward her.
+
+"Don't be dumb, Buddy," she said, in the words of their unforgotten
+first talk. "You've--you've got me--if you still want me."
+
+She put out a tremulous hand to him, and it slipped over his shoulder
+and around his neck, and she was drawn close into his arms.
+
+"The Little Red Doctor," remarked David after an interlude, in the
+shaken tone of one who has had undeserved miracles thrust upon him,
+"said that to want something more than anything in the world and not get
+it was good for my soul, besides serving me right."
+
+"The Little Red Doctor," retorted Mary McCartney, with the reckless
+ingratitude of a woman in love, "is a dear little red idiot. What does
+he know about _Us!_"
+
+
+
+BARBRAN
+
+Immediately upon hearing of my fell design MacLachan, the tailor, paid a
+visit of protest to my bench.
+
+"Is it true fact that I hear, Dominie?"
+
+"What do you hear, MacLachan?"
+
+"That ye're to make one of yer silly histories about Barbran?"
+
+"Perfectly true," said I, passing over the uncomplimentary adjective.
+
+"'Tis a feckless waste of time."
+
+"Very likely."
+
+"'Twill encourage the pair, when a man of yer age and influence in Our
+Square should be dissuadin' them."
+
+"Perhaps they need a friendly word."
+
+MacLachan frowned. "Ye're determined?"
+
+"Oh, quite!"
+
+"Then I'll give ye a title for yer romance."
+
+"That's very kind of you. Give it."
+
+"The Story of Two Young Fools. By an Old One," said MacLachan
+witheringly, and turned to depart.
+
+"Mac!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wait a moment."
+
+I held him with my glittering eye. Also, in case that should be
+inadequate, with the crook of my cane firmly fixed upon his ankle.
+
+"I'll waste na time from the tailorin'," began the Scot disdainfully,
+but paused as I pointed a loaded finger at his head. "Well?" he said,
+showing a guilty inclination to flinch.
+
+"Mac, was _I_ an original accomplice in this affair?"
+
+"Will ye purtend to deny--"
+
+"Did _I_ scheme and plot with Cyrus the Gaunt and young Stacey?"
+
+MacLachan mumbled something about undue influence.
+
+"Did _I_ get arrested?"
+
+MacLachan grunted.
+
+"In a cellar?"
+
+MacLachan snorted.
+
+"With my nose painted green?"
+
+MacLachan groaned. "There was others," he pleaded.
+
+"A man of your age and influence in Our Square," I interrupted sternly,
+"should have been dissuading them."
+
+"Arr ye designin' to put all that in yer sil--in yer interestin'
+account?"
+
+"Every detail."
+
+MacLachan dislodged my crook from his leg, gave me such a look as
+mid-Victorian painters strove for in pictures of the Dying Stag, and
+retired to his Home of Fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That men of the sobriety and standing of Cyrus the Gaunt, MacLachan,
+Leon Coventry, the Little Red Doctor, and Boggs (I do not count young
+Phil Stacey, for he was insane at the time, and has been so, with
+modifications and glorifications, ever since) should paint their noses
+green and frequent dubious cellars, calls for explanation. The
+explanation is Barbran.
+
+Barbran came to us from the immeasurable distances; to wit, Washington
+Square.
+
+Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude
+toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway.
+Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when
+the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow
+whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich
+Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions,
+whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with
+paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its
+inconsiderable laundry bills. Washington Square we suspect of playing at
+life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little
+in common.
+
+Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not
+wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the
+Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman
+architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by
+street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense
+urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her
+far afield, met Barbran.
+
+They went for coffee to a queer little burrow decorated with improving
+sentiments from the immortal Lewis Carroll which, Barbran told the
+Bonnie Lassie, was making its blue-smocked, bobbed-haired, attractive
+and shrewd little proprietress quite rich. Barbran hinted that she was
+thinking of improving on the Mole's Hole idea if she could find a
+suitable location, not so much for the money, of course--her tone
+implied a lordly indifference to such considerations--as for the fun of
+the thing.
+
+The Bonnie Lassie was amused but not impressed. What did impress her
+about Barbran was a certain gay yet restful charm; the sort of difficult
+thing that our indomitable sculptress loves to catch and fix in her
+wonderful little bronzes. She set about catching Barbran.
+
+Now the way of a snake with a bird is as nothing for fascination
+compared to the way of the Bonnie Lassie with the doomed person whom she
+has marked down as a subject. Barbran hesitated, capitulated, came to
+the Bonnie Lassie's house, moused about Our Square in a rapt manner and
+stayed. She rented a room from the Angel of Death ("Boggs Kills Bugs" is
+the remainder of his sign, which is considered to lend tone and local
+interest to his whole side of the Square), just over Madame Tallafferr's
+apartments, and, in the course of time, stopped at my bench and looked
+at me contemplatively. She was a small person with shy, soft eyes.
+
+"The Bonnie Lassie sent you," said I.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"You've come here to live--Heaven only knows why--but we're glad to see
+you. And you want to know about the people; so the Bonnie Lassie said,
+'Ask the Dominie; he landed here from the ark.' Didn't she?"
+
+Barbran sat down and smiled at me.
+
+"Having sought information," I pursued, "on my own account, I learn that
+you are the only daughter of a Western millionaire ranch-owner. How does
+it feel to revel in millions?"
+
+"Romantic," said she.
+
+"Of course you have designs upon us."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Humanitarian, artistic, or sociological?"
+
+"Oh, nothing long and clever like that."
+
+"You grow more interesting. Having designs upon us, you doubtless wish
+my advice."
+
+"No," she answered softly: "I've done it already."
+
+"Rash and precipitate adventuress! What have you done already?"
+
+"Started my designs. I've rented the basement of Number 26."
+
+"Are you a rag-picker in disguise?"
+
+"I'm going to start a coffee cellar. I was thinking of calling it 'The
+Coffee Pot.' What do you think?"
+
+"So you do wish my advice. I will give it to you. Do you see that
+plumber's shop next to the corner saloon?" I pointed to the Avenue whose
+ceaseless stream of humanity flows past Our Square without ever sweeping
+us into its current. "That was once a tea-shop. It was started by a dear
+little, prim little old maiden lady. The saloon was run by Tough Bill
+Manigan. The little old lady had a dainty sign painted and hung it up
+outside her place, 'The Teacup.' Tough Bill took a board and painted a
+sign and hung it up outside _his_ place; 'The Hiccup.' The dear little,
+prim little old maiden lady took down her sign and went away. Yet there
+are those who say that competition is the life of trade."
+
+"Is there a moral to your story, Mr. Dominie?"
+
+"Take it or leave it," said I amiably.
+
+"I will not call my cellar 'The Coffee Pot' lest a worse thing befall
+it."
+
+"You are a sensible young woman, Miss Barbara Ann Waterbury."
+
+"It is true that my parents named me that," said she, "but my friends
+call me 'Barbran' because I always used to call myself that when I was
+little, and I want to be called Barbran here."
+
+"That's very friendly of you," I observed.
+
+She gave me a swift, suspicious look. "You think I'm a fool," she
+observed calmly. "But I'm not. I'm going to become a local institution.
+A local institution can't be called Barbara Ann Waterbury, unless it's a
+crêche or a drinking-fountain or something like that, can it?"
+
+"It cannot, Barbran."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Dominie," said Barbran gratefully. She then proceeded to
+sketch out for me her plans for making her Coffee Cellar and herself a
+Local Institution, which should lure hopeful seekers for Bohemia from
+the far parts of Harlem and Jersey City, and even such outer realms of
+darkness as New Haven and Cohoes.
+
+"That's what I intend to do," said Barbran, "as soon as I get my Great
+Idea worked out."
+
+What the Great Idea was, I was to learn later and from other lips. In
+fact, from the lips of young Phil Stacey, who appeared, rather
+elaborately loitering out from behind the fountain, shortly after my new
+friend had departed, a peculiar look upon his extremely plain and
+friendly face. Young Mr. Stacey is notable, if for no other reason than
+that he represents a flat artistic failure on the part of the Bonnie
+Lassie, who has tried him in bronze, in plaster, and in clay with equal
+lack of success. There is something untransferable in the boy's face;
+perhaps its outshining character. I know that I never yet have said to
+any woman who knew him, no matter what her age, condition, or
+sentimental predilections, "Isn't he a homely cub!" that she didn't
+reply indignantly: "He's _sweet_!" Now when women--wonderful women like
+the Bonnie Lassie and stupid women like Mrs. Rosser, the twins' aunt,
+and fastidious women like Madame Tallafferr--unite in terming a smiling
+human freckle "_sweet_," there is nothing more to be said. Adonis may as
+well take a back seat and the Apollo Belvedere seek the helpful
+resources of a beauty parlor. Said young Phil carelessly:
+
+"Dominie, who's the newcomer?"
+
+"That," said I, "is Barbran."
+
+"Barbran," he repeated with a rising inflection. "It sounds like a
+breakfast food."
+
+"As she pronounces it, it sounds like a strain of music," said I.
+
+"What's the rest of her name?"
+
+"I am not officially authorized to communicate that."
+
+"Are you officially authorized to present your friends to her?"
+
+"On what do you base your claim to acquaintanceship, my boy?" I asked
+austerely.
+
+"Oh, claim! Well, you see, a couple of days ago, she was on the
+cross-town car; and I--well, I just happened to notice her, you know.
+That's all."
+
+"Yet I am informed on good and sufficient authority that her appearance
+is not such as to commend her, visually, if I may so express myself, to
+the discriminating eye."
+
+"Who's the fool--" began Mr. Stacey hotly.
+
+"Tut-tut, my young friend," said I. "Certain ladies whom we both esteem
+can and will prove, to the satisfaction of the fair-minded, that none of
+the young person's features is exactly what it should be or precisely
+where it ought to be. Nevertheless, the net result is surprising and
+even gratifying."
+
+"She's a peach!" asseverated my companion.
+
+"Substantially what I was remarking. As for your other hint, you need no
+introduction to Barbran. Nobody does."
+
+"_What_?" Phil Stacey's plain face became ugly; a hostile light
+glittered in his eyes. "What do you mean by that?" he growled.
+
+"Simply that she's about to become a local institution. She's plotting
+against the peace and security of Our Square, to the extent of starting
+a coffee-house at Number 26."
+
+"No!" cried Phil joyously. "Good news!"
+
+"As a fad. She's a budding millionairess from the West."
+
+"No!" growled Phil, his face falling.
+
+"Bad news; eh? It occurred to me that she might want some decorations,
+and that you might be the one to do them." In his leisure hours, my
+young friend, who is an expert accountant by trade (the term "expert"
+appears to be rather an empty compliment, since his stipend is only
+twenty-five dollars a week), perpetrates impressionistic decorations and
+scenery for such minor theaters as will endure them.
+
+"You're a grand old man, Dominie!" said he. "Let's go."
+
+We went. We found Barbran. We conversed. Half an hour later when I left
+them--without any strenuous protests on the part of either--they were
+deeply engrossed in a mutual discussion upon decorations, religion, the
+high cost of living, free verse, two-cent transfers, Charley Chaplin,
+aviation, ouija, and other equally safe topics. Did I say safe?
+Dangerous is what I mean. For when a youth who is as homely as young
+Phil Stacey and in that particular style of homeliness, and a girl who
+is as far from homely as Barbran begin, at first sight, to explore each
+other's opinions, they are venturing into a dim and haunted region,
+lighted by will-o'-the-wisps and beset with perils and pitfalls. Usually
+they smile as they go. Phil was smiling as I left them. So was Barbran.
+I may have smiled myself.
+
+Anything but a smile was on Phil Stacey's normally cheerful face when,
+some three days thereafter, he came to my rooms.
+
+"Dominie," said he, "I want to tap your library. Have you got any of the
+works of Harvey Wheelwright?"
+
+"God forbid!" said I.
+
+Phil looked surprised. "Is it as bad as that? I didn't suppose there was
+anything wrong with the stuff."
+
+"Don't you imperil your decent young soul with it," I advised earnestly.
+"It reeks of poisonous piety. The world he paints is so full of
+nauseating virtues that any self-respecting man would rather live in
+hell. His characters all talk like a Sunday-school picnic out of the
+Rollo books. No such people ever lived or ever could live, because a
+righteously enraged populace would have killed 'em in early childhood.
+He's the smuggest fraud and best seller in the United States.
+Wheelwright? The crudest, shrewdest, most preposterous panderer to
+weak-minded--"
+
+"Whew! Help! I didn't know what I was starting," protested my visitor.
+"As a literary critic you're some Big Bertha, Dominie. I begin to
+suspect that you don't care an awful lot about Mr. Wheelwright's style
+of composition. Just the same, I've got to read him. All of him. Do you
+think I'll find his stuff in the Penny Circulator?"
+
+"My poor, lost boy! Probably not. It is doubtless all out in the hands
+of eager readers."
+
+However, Phil contrived to round it up somewhere. The awful and
+unsuspected results I beheld on my first visit of patronage to Barbran's
+cellar, the occasion being the formal opening. A large and curious crowd
+of five persons, including myself and Phil Stacey, were there. Outside,
+an old English design of a signboard with a wheel on it creaked
+despairingly in the wind. Below was a legend: "_At the Sign of the
+Wheel_--_The Wrightery_." The interior of the cellar was decorated with
+scenes from the novels of Harvey Wheelwright, triumphant virtue,
+discomfited villains, benignant blessings, chaste embraces, edifying
+death-beds, and orange-blossoms. They were unsigned; but well I knew
+whose was the shame. Over the fireplace hung a framed letter from the
+Great Soul. It began, "Dear Young Friend and Admirer," and ended, "Yours
+for the Light. Harvey Wheelwright."
+
+The guests did as well as could be expected. They ate and drank
+everything in sight. They then left; that is to say, four of them did.
+Finally Phil departed, glowering at me. I am a patient soul. No sooner
+had the door slammed behind him than I turned to Barbran, who was
+looking discouraged.
+
+"Well, what have you to say in your defense?"
+
+The way Barbran's eyebrows went up constituted in itself a defense fit
+to move any jury to acquittal.
+
+"For what?" she asked.
+
+"For corrupting my young friend Stacey. You made him paint those
+pictures."
+
+"They're very nice," returned Barbran demurely. "Quite true to the
+subject."
+
+"They're awful. They're an offense to civilization. They're an insult to
+Our Square. Of all subjects in the world, Harvey Wheelwright! Why,
+Barbran? Why? Why? Why?"
+
+"Business," said Barbran.
+
+"Explain, please," said I.
+
+"I got the idea from a friend of mine in Washington Square. She got up a
+little cellar café built around Alice. Alice in Wonderland, you know,
+and the Looking Glass. Though I don't suppose a learned and serious
+person like you would ever have read such nonsense."
+
+"It happened to be Friday and there wasn't a hippopotamus in the house,"
+I murmured.
+
+"Oh," said Barbran, brightening. "Well, I thought if she could do it
+with Alice, I could do it with Harvey Wheelwright."
+
+"In the name of Hatta and the March Hare, _why_?"
+
+"Because, for every one person who reads Alice nowadays, ten read the
+author of 'Reborn Through Righteousness' and 'Called by the Cause.'
+Isn't it so?"
+
+"Mathematically unimpeachable."
+
+"Therefore I ought to get ten times as many people as the other place.
+Don't you think so?" she inquired wistfully.
+
+Who am I to withhold a comforting fallacy from a hopeful soul.
+"Undoubtedly," I agreed. "But do you love him?"
+
+"Who?" said Barbran, with a start. The faint pink color ran up her
+cheeks.
+
+"Harvey Wheelwright, of course. Whom did you think I meant?"
+
+"He is a very estimable writer," returned Barbran primly, quite ignoring
+my other query.
+
+"Good-night, Barbran," said I sadly. "I'm going out to mourn your lost
+soul."
+
+One might reasonably expect to find peace and quiet in the vicinity of
+one's own particular bench at 11.45 P.M. in Our Square. But not at all
+on this occasion. There sat Phil Stacey. I challenged him at once.
+
+"What did you do it for?"
+
+To do him justice he did not dodge or pretend to misunderstand. "Pay,"
+said he.
+
+"Phil! Did you take money for that stuff?"
+
+"Not exactly. I'm taking it out in trade. I'm going to eat there."
+
+"You'll starve to death."
+
+"I haven't got much of an appetite."
+
+"The inevitable effect of overfeeding on sweets. An uninterrupted diet
+of Harvey Wheelwright--"
+
+"Don't speak the swine's name," implored Phil, "or I'll be sick."
+
+"You've sold your artistic birthright for a mess of pottage, probably
+indigestible at that."
+
+"I don't care," he averred stoutly. "I don't care for anything
+except--Dominie, who told you her father was a millionaire?"
+
+"It's well known," I said vaguely. "He's a cattle king or an emperor of
+sheep or the sultan of the piggery or something. A good thing for
+Barbran, too, if she expects to keep her cellar going. The kind of
+people who read Har--our unmentionable author, don't frequent Bohemian
+coffee cellars. They would regard it as reckless and abandoned
+debauchery. Barbran has shot at the wrong mark."
+
+"The place has got to be a success," declared Phil between his teeth,
+his plain face expressing a sort of desperate determination.
+
+"Otherwise the butterfly will fly back West," I suggested. The boy
+winced.
+
+What man could do to make it a success, Phil Stacey did and heroically.
+Not only did he eat all his meals there, but he went forth into the
+highways and byways and haled in other patrons (whom he privately paid
+for) to an extent which threatened to exhaust his means.
+
+Our Square is conservative, not to say distrustful in its bearing toward
+innovations. Thornsen's Élite Restaurant has always sufficed for our
+inner cravings. We are, I suppose, too old to change. Nor does Harvey
+Wheelwright exercise an inspirational sway over us. We let the little
+millionairess and her Washington Square importation pretty well alone.
+She advertised feebly in the "Where to Eat" columns, catching a few
+stray outlanders, but for the most part people didn't come. Until the
+first of the month, that is. Then too many came. They brought their
+bills with them.
+
+Evening after evening Barbran and Phil Stacey sat in the cellar almost
+or quite alone. So far as I could judge from my occasional visits of
+patronage (Barbran furnished excellent sweet cider and cakes for late
+comers), they endured the lack of custom with fortitude, not to say
+indifference. But in the mornings her soft eyes looked heavy, and once,
+as she was passing my bench deep in thought, I surprised a look of blank
+terror on her face. One can understand that even a millionaire's
+daughter might spend sleepless nights brooding over a failure. But that
+look of mortal dread! How well I know it! How often have I seen it,
+preceding some sordid or brave tragedy of want and wretchedness in Our
+Square! What should it mean, though, on Barbran's sunny face? Puzzling
+over the question I put it to the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"Read me a riddle, O Lady of the Wise Heart. Of what is a child of
+fortune, young, strong, and charming, afraid?"
+
+At the time we were passing the house in which the insecticidal Angel of
+Death takes carefully selected and certified lodgers.
+
+"I know whom you mean," said the Bonnie Lassie, pointing up to the
+little dormer window which was Barbran's outlook on life. "Interpret me
+a signal. What do you see up there?"
+
+"It appears to be a handkerchief pasted to the window," said I adjusting
+my glasses.
+
+"Upside down," said the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"How can a handkerchief be upside down?" I inquired, in what was
+intended to be a tone of sweet reasonableness.
+
+Contempt was all that it brought me. "Metaphorically, of course! It's a
+signal of distress."
+
+"In what distress can Barbran be?"
+
+"In what kind of distress are most people who live next under the roof
+in Our Square?"
+
+"She's doing that just to get into our atmosphere. She told me so
+herself. A millionaire's daughter--"
+
+"Do millionaires' daughters wash their own handkerchiefs and paste them
+on windows to dry? Does any woman in or out of Our Square _ever_ soak
+her own handkerchiefs in her own washbowl except when she's desperately
+saving pennies? Did you ever wash one single handkerchief in your
+rooms, Dominie?"
+
+"Certainly not. It isn't manly. Then you think she isn't a
+millionairess?"
+
+"Look at her shoes when next you see her," answered the Bonnie Lassie
+conclusively. "_I_ think the poor little thing has put her every cent in
+the world into her senseless cellar, and she's going under."
+
+"But, good Heavens!" I exclaimed. "Something has got to be done."
+
+"It's going to be."
+
+"Who's going to do it?"
+
+"Me," returned the Bonnie Lassie, who is least grammatical when most
+purposeful.
+
+"Then," said I, "the Fates may as well shut up shop and Providence take
+a day off; the universe has temporarily changed its management. Can
+I help?"
+
+The Bonnie Lassie focused her gaze in a peculiar manner upon the exact
+center of my countenance. A sort of fairy grin played about her lips. "I
+wonder if--No," she sighed. "No. I don't think it would do, Dominie.
+Anyway, I've got six without you."
+
+"Including Phil Stacey?"
+
+"Of course," retorted the Bonnie Lassie. "It was he who came to me for
+help. I'm really doing this for him."
+
+"I thought you were doing it for Barbran."
+
+"Oh; she's just a transposed Washington Squarer," answered the tyrant of
+Our Square. "Though she's a dear kiddie, too, underneath the nonsense."
+
+"Do I understand--"
+
+"I don't see," interrupted the Bonnie Lassie sweetly, "how you could. I
+haven't told you. And the rest are bound to secrecy. But don't be unduly
+alarmed at anything queer you may see in Our Square within the next
+few days."
+
+Only by virtue of that warning was I able to command the emotions
+aroused by an encounter with Cyrus the Gaunt some evenings later. He was
+hurrying across the park space in the furtive manner of one going to a
+shameful rendezvous, and upon my hailing him he at first essayed to
+sheer off. When he saw who it was he came up with a rather swaggering
+and nonchalant effect. I may observe here that nobody has a monopoly of
+nonchalance in this world.
+
+"Good-evening, Cyrus," I said.
+
+"Good-evening, Dominie."
+
+"Beautiful weather we're having."
+
+"Couldn't be finer."
+
+"Do you think it will hold?"
+
+"The paper says rain to-morrow."
+
+"Why is the tip of your nose painted green?"
+
+"Is it green?" inquired Cyrus, as if he hadn't given the matter any
+special consideration, but thought it quite possible.
+
+"Emerald," said I. "It looks as if it were mortifying."
+
+"It would be mortifying," admitted Cyrus the Gaunt, "if it weren't in a
+good cause."
+
+"What cause?" I asked.
+
+"Come out of there!" said Cyrus the Gaunt, not to me, but to a figure
+lurking in the shrubbery.
+
+The Little Red Doctor emerged. I took one look at his most distinctive
+feature.
+
+"You, too!" I said. "What do you mean by it?"
+
+"Ask Cyrus," returned the Little Red Doctor glumly.
+
+"It's a cult," said Cyrus. "The credit of the notion belongs not to me,
+but to my esteemed better half. A few chosen souls--"
+
+"Here comes another of them," I conjectured, as a bowed form approached.
+"Who is it? MacLachan!"
+
+The old Scot appeared to be suffering from a severe cold. His
+handkerchief was pressed to his face.
+
+"Take it down, Mac," I ordered. "It's useless." He did so, and my worst
+suspicions were confirmed.
+
+"He bullied me into it," declared the tailor, glowering at Cyrus the
+Gaunt.
+
+"It'll do your nose good," declared Cyrus jauntily. "Give it a change.
+Complementary colors, you know. What ho! Our leader."
+
+Phil Stacey appeared. He appeared serious; that is, as serious as one
+can appear when his central feature glows like the starboard light of an
+incoming steamship. Following him were Leon Coventry, huge and shy, and
+the lethal Boggs looking unhappy.
+
+"Where are you all going?" I demanded.
+
+"To the Wrightery," said Phil.
+
+"Is it a party?"
+
+"It's a gathering."
+
+"Am I included?"
+
+"If you'll--"
+
+"Not on any account," I declared firmly. It had just occurred to me why
+the Bonnie Lassie had centered her gaze upon my features. "Follow your
+indecent noses as far as you like. I stay."
+
+Still lost in meditation, I may have dozed on my bench, when heavy,
+measured footsteps aroused me. I looked up to see Terry the Cop,
+guardian of our peace, arbiter of differences, conservator of our
+morals. I peered at him with anxiety.
+
+"Terry," I inquired, "how is your nose?"
+
+"Keen, Dominie," said Terry. He sniffed the air. "Don't you detect the
+smell of illegal alcohol?"
+
+"I can't say I do."
+
+"It's very plain," declared the officer wriggling his nasal organ which,
+I was vastly relieved to observe, retained its original hue. "Wouldn't
+you say, Dominie, it comes from yonder cellar?"
+
+"Barbran's cellar?
+
+"I am informed that a circle of dangerous char-_ack_ters with green
+noses gather there and drink cider containing more than two-seventy-five
+per cent of apple juice. I'm about to pull the place."
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Terry; don't do that! You'll scare--"
+
+"Whisht, Dominie!" interrupted Terry with an elaborate wink. "There'll
+be no surprise, except maybe to the Judge in the morning. You better
+drop in at the court."
+
+Of the round-up I have no details, except that it seemed to be quietly
+conducted. The case was called the next day, before Magistrate Wolf Tone
+Hanrahan, known as the "Human Judge." Besides being human, his Honor is,
+as may be inferred from his name, somewhat Irish. He heard the evidence,
+tested the sample, announced his intention of coming around that evening
+for some more, and honorably discharged Barbran.
+
+"And what about these min?" he inquired, gazing upon the dauntless six.
+
+"Dangerous suspects, Yeronner," said Terry the Cop.
+
+"They look mild as goat's milk to me," returned the Magistrate, "though
+now I get me eye on the rid-hidded wan [with a friendly wink at the
+Little Red Doctor] I reckonize him as a desprit charackter that'd save
+your life as soon as look at ye. What way are they dang'rous?"
+
+"When apprehended," replied Terry, looking covertly about to see that
+the reporters were within hearing distance, "their noses were
+painted green."
+
+"Is this true?" asked the Magistrate of the six.
+
+"It is, your Honor," they replied.
+
+"An', why not!" demanded the Human Judge hotly. "'Tis a glorious color!
+Erin go bragh! Off'cer, ye've exceeded yer jooty. D' ye think this is
+downtrodden an' sufferin' Oireland an' yerself the tyrant Gineral
+French? Let 'em paint their noses anny color they loike; but green for
+preference. I'm tellin' ye, this is the land of freedom an' equality,
+an' ivery citizen thereof is entitled to life, liberty, and the purshoot
+of happiness, an' a man's nose is his castle, an' don't ye fergit it.
+Dis-charrrrged! Go an' sin no more. I mane, let the good worruk go awn!"
+
+"Now watch for the evening papers," said young Phil Stacey exultantly.
+"The Wrightery will get some free advertising that'll crowd it
+for months."
+
+Alas for youth's golden hopes! The evening papers ignored the carefully
+prepared event. One morning paper published a paragraph, attributing the
+green noses to a masquerade party. The conspirators, gathered at the
+cellar with their war-paints on (in case of reporters), discussed the
+fiasco in embittered tones. Young Stacey raged against a stupid and
+corrupt press. MacLachan expressed the acidulous hope that thereafter
+Cyrus the Gaunt would be content with making a fool of himself without
+implicating innocent and confiding friends. The Bonnie Lassie was not
+present, but sent word (characteristically) that they must have done it
+all wrong; men had no sense, anyway. The party then sent out for
+turpentine and broke up to reassemble no more. Only Phil Stacey,
+inventor of the great idea, was still faithful to and hopeful of it.
+Each evening he conscientiously greened himself and went to eat
+with Barbran.
+
+Time justified his faith. One evening there dropped in a plump man who
+exhaled a mild and comforting benevolence, like a gentle country parson.
+He smiled sweetly at Phil, and introduced himself as a reporter for the
+"Sunday World Magazine"--and where was the rest of the circle? In a
+flurry of excitement, the pair sent for Cyrus the Gaunt to do the
+talking. Cyrus arrived, breathless and a trifle off color (the Bonnie
+Lassie had unfortunately got a touch of bronze scenic paint mixed with
+the green, so that he smelled like an over-ripe banana), and proceeded
+to exposition.
+
+"This," he explained, "is a new cult. It is based on the
+back-to-the-spring idea. The well-spring of life, you know.
+The--er--spring of eternal youth, and--and so forth. You understand?"
+
+"I hope to," said the reporter politely. "Why on the nose?"
+
+"I will explain that," returned Cyrus, getting his second wind; "but
+first let me get the central idea in your mind. It's a nature movement;
+a readjustment of art to nature. All nature is green. Look about you."
+Here he paused for effect, which was unfortunate.
+
+"Quite so," agreed the reporter. "The cable-car, for instance, and the
+dollar bill, not to mention the croton bug and the polar bear. But,
+pardon me, I interrupt the flow of your eloquence."
+
+"You do," said Cyrus severely. "Inanimate nature I speak of. All
+inanimate nature is green. But we poor fellow creatures have gotten away
+from the universal mother-color. We must get back to it. We must learn
+to think greenly. But first we must learn to see greenly. How shall we
+accomplish this? Put green in our eyes? Impossible, unfortunately. But,
+our noses--there is the solution. In direct proximity to the eye, the
+color, properly applied, tints one's vision of all things. Green shadows
+in a green world," mooned Cyrus the Gaunt poetically. "As the bard
+puts it:
+
+  "'Annihilating all that's made
+  To a green thought in a green shade.'"
+
+"Wait a minute," said the visitor, and made a note on an envelope-back.
+
+"Accordingly, Miss Barbran, the daughter and heiress of a millionaire
+cattle owner in Wyoming [here the reporter made his second note], has
+established this center where we meet to renew and refresh our souls."
+
+"Good!" said the benevolent reporter. "Fine! Of course it's all bunk--"
+
+"Bunk!" echoed Barbran and Phil, aghast, while Cyrus sat with his lank
+jaw drooping.
+
+"You don't see any of your favorite color in my eye, do you?" inquired
+the visitor pleasantly. "Just what you're putting over I don't know.
+Some kind of new grease paint, perhaps. Don't tell me. It's good enough,
+anyway. I'll fall for it. It's worth a page story. Of course I'll want
+some photographs of the mural paintings. They're almost painfully
+beautiful.... What's wrong with our young friend; is he sick?" he added,
+looking with astonishment at Phil Stacey who was exhibiting
+sub-nauseous symptoms.
+
+"He painted 'em," explained Cyrus, grinning.
+
+"And he's sorry," supplemented Barbran.
+
+"Yes; I wouldn't wonder. Well, I won't give him away," said the kindly
+journalist. "Now, as to the membership of your circle...."
+
+The Sunday "story" covered a full page. The "millionairess" feature was
+played up conspicuously and repeatedly, and the illustrations did what
+little the text failed to do. It was a "josh-story" from beginning
+to end.
+
+"I'll kill that pious fraud of a reporter," declared Phil.
+
+"Now the place _is_ ruined," mourned Barbran.
+
+"Wait and see," advised the wiser Cyrus.
+
+Great is the power of publicity. The Wrightery was swamped with custom
+on the Monday evening following publication, and for the rest of that
+week and the succeeding week.
+
+"I never was good at figures," said the transported Barbran to Phil
+Stacey at the close of the month, "but as near as I can make out, I've a
+clear profit of eight dollars and seventy cents. My fortune is made. And
+it's all due to you."
+
+Had the Bonnie Lassie been able to hold her painted retainers in line,
+the owner's golden prophecy might have been made good. But they had
+other matters on hand for their evenings than sitting about in a dim
+cellar gazing cross-eyed at their own scandalous noses. MacLachan was
+the first defection. He said that he thought he was going crazy and he
+knew he was going blind. The Little Red Doctor was unreliable owing to
+the pressure of professional calls. He complained with some justice that
+a green nose on a practicing physician tended to impair confidence. Then
+Leon Coventry went away, and Boggs discovered (or invented) an important
+engagement with a growing family of clothes-moths in a Connecticut
+country house. So there remained only the faithful Phil. One swallow
+does not make a summer; nor does one youth with a vernal proboscis
+convince a skeptical public that it is enjoying the fearful
+companionship of a subversive and revolutionary cult. Patronage ebbed
+out as fast as it had flooded in. Barbran's eyes were as soft and happy
+as ever in the evenings, when she and Phil sat in a less and less
+interrupted solitude. But in the mornings palpable fear stalked her.
+Phil never saw it. He was preoccupied with a dread of his own.
+
+One evening of howling wind and hammering rain, when all was cosy and
+home-like for two in the little firelit Wrightery, she nerved herself up
+to facing the facts.
+
+"It's going to be a failure," she said dismally.
+
+"Then you're going away?" he asked, trying to keep his voice from
+quaking.
+
+She set her little chin quite firmly. "Not while there's a chance left
+of pulling it out."
+
+"Well; it doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned," he muttered. "I'm
+going away myself."
+
+"You?" She sat up very straight and startled. "Where?"
+
+"Kansas City."
+
+"Oh! What for?"
+
+"Do you remember a fat old grandpa who was here last month and came back
+to ask about the decorations?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He's built him a new house--he calls it a mansion--and he wants me to
+paint the music-room. He likes"--Phil gulped a little--"my style
+of art."
+
+"Isn't that great!" said Barbran in the voice of one giving three cheers
+for a funeral. "How does he want his music-room decorated?"
+
+Young Phil put his head in his hands. "Scenes from Moody and Sankey," he
+said in a muffled voice.
+
+"Good gracious! You aren't going to do it?"
+
+"I am," retorted the other gloomily. "It's good money." Almost
+immediately he added, "Damn the money!"
+
+"No; no; you mustn't do that. You must go, of course. Would--will it
+take long?"
+
+"I'm not coming back."
+
+"I don't _want_ you not to come back," said Barbran, in a queer,
+frightened voice. She put out her hand to him and hastily withdrew it.
+
+He said desperately: "What's the use? I can't sit here forever looking
+at you and--and dreaming of--of impossible things, and eating my heart
+out with my nose painted green."
+
+"The poor nose!" murmured Barbran.
+
+With one of her home-laundered handkerchiefs dipped in turpentine, she
+gently rubbed it clean. It then looked (as she said later in a feeble
+attempt to palliate her subsequent conduct) very pink and boyish and
+pathetic, but somehow faithful and reliable and altogether lovable.
+
+So she kissed it. Then she tried to run away. The attempt failed.
+
+It was not Barbran's nose that got kissed next. Nor, for that matter,
+was it young Phil's. Then he held her off and shut his eyes, for the
+untrammeled exercise of his reasoning powers, and again demanded of
+Barbran and the fates:
+
+"What's the use?"
+
+"What's the use of what?" returned Barbran tremulously.
+
+"Of all this? Your father's a millionaire, and I won't--I can't--"
+
+"He isn't!" cried Barbran. "And you can--you will."
+
+"He isn't?" ejaculated Phil. "What is he?"
+
+"He's a school-teacher, and I haven't got a thing but debts."
+
+Phil received this untoward news as if a flock of angels, ringing joy
+bells, had just brought him the gladdest tidings in history. After an
+interlude he said:
+
+"But, why--"
+
+"Because," said Barbran, burrowing her nose in his coat: "I thought it
+would be an asset. I thought people would consider it romantic and it
+would help business. See how much that reporter made of it! Phil!
+Wh-wh-why are you treating me like a--a--a--dumbbell?"
+
+For he had thrust her away from him at arm's-length again.
+
+"There's one other thing between us, Barbran."
+
+"If there is, it's your fault. What is it?"
+
+"Harvey Wheelwright," he said solemnly. "Do you really like that
+sickening slush-slinger?"
+
+She raised to him eyes in which a righteous hate quivered. "I loathe
+him. I've always loathed him. I despise the very ink he writes with and
+the paper it's printed on."
+
+When I happened in a few minutes later, they were ritually burning the
+"Dear Friend and Admirer" letter in a slow candle-flame, and Harvey
+Wheelwright, as represented by his unctuously rolling signature, was
+writhing in merited torment. Between them they told me their
+little romance.
+
+"And he's not going to Kansas City," said Barbran defiantly.
+
+"I'm not going anywhere, ever, away from Barbran," said young Phil.
+
+"And he's going to paint what he wants to."
+
+"Pictures of Barbran," said young Phil.
+
+"And we're going to burn the Wheel sign in effigy, and wipe off the
+walls and _make_ the place a success," said Barbran.
+
+"And we're going to be married right away," said Phil.
+
+"Next week," said Barbran.
+
+"What do you think?" said both.
+
+Now I know what I ought to have said just as well as MacLachan himself.
+I should have pointed out the folly and recklessness of marrying on
+twenty-five dollars a week and a dowry of debts. I should have preached
+prudence and caution and delay, and have pointed out--The wind blew the
+door open: Young Spring was in the park, and the wet odor of little
+burgeoning leaves was borne in, wakening unwithered memories in my
+withered heart.
+
+"Bless you, my children!" said I.
+
+It was actually for this, as holding out encouragement to their
+reckless, feckless plans, that Wisdom, in the person of MacLachan, the
+tailor, reprehended me, rather than for my historical intentions
+regarding the pair.
+
+"What'll they be marryin' on?" demanded Mac Wisdom--that is to say,
+MacLachan.
+
+"Spring and youth," I said. "The fragrance of lilac in the air, the glow
+of romance in their hearts. What better would you ask?"
+
+"A bit of prudence," said MacLachan.
+
+"Prudence!" I retorted scornfully. "The miser of the virtues. It may pay
+its own way through the world. But when did it ever take Happiness along
+for a jaunt?"
+
+I was quite pleased with my little epigram until the Scot countered upon
+me with his observation about two young fools and an old one.
+
+Oh, well! Likely enough. Most unwise, and rash and inexcusable, that
+headlong mating; and there will be a reckoning to pay. Babies, probably,
+and new needs and pressing anxieties, and Love will perhaps flutter at
+the window when Want shows his grim face at the door; and Wisdom will be
+justified of his forebodings, and yet--and yet--who am I, old and lonely
+and uncompanioned, yet once touched with the spheral music and the
+sacred fire, that I should subscribe to the dour orthodoxies of
+MacLachan and that ilk?
+
+Years and years ago a bird flew in at my window, a bird of wonderful and
+flashing hues, and of lilting melodies. It came; it tarried--and I let
+the chill voice of Prudence overbear its music. It left me. But the song
+endures; the song endures, and all life has been the richer for its
+echoes. So let them hold and cherish their happiness, the two
+young fools.
+
+As for the old one, would that some good fairy, possessed of the pigment
+and secret of perishable youth, might come down and paint his
+nose green!
+
+
+
+PLOOIE OF OUR SQUARE
+
+Whenever Plooie went shuffling by my bench, I used to think of an old
+and melancholy song that my grandfather sang:
+
+  "And his skin was so thin
+    You could almost see his bones
+  As he ran, hobble--hobble--hobble
+    Over the stones."
+
+Before I could wholly recapture the quaint melody, my efforts would
+invariably be nullified by the raucous shriek of his trade which had
+forever fixed the nickname whereby Our Square knew Plooie:
+
+"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder!" He would then recapitulate
+in English, or rather that unreproducible dialect which was his
+substitute for it. "Oombrella for mend? Annie oombrella for mend?"
+
+So he would pass on his way, shattering the peaceful air at half-minute
+intervals with his bilingual disharmonies. He was pallid, meagerly
+built, stoop-shouldered, bristly-haired, pock-marked, and stiff-gaited,
+with a face which would have been totally insignificant but for an
+obstinate chin and a pair of velvet-black, pathetically questioning
+eyes; and he was incurably an outlander. For five years he had lived
+among us, occupying a cubbyhole in Schepstein's basement full of ribs,
+handles, crooks, patches, and springs, without appreciably improving his
+speech or his position. It was said that his name was Garin--nobody
+really knew or cared--and it was assumed from his speech that he
+was French.
+
+Few umbrellas came his way. Those of us affluent enough to maintain such
+non-essentials patch them ourselves until they are beyond reclamation.
+Why Plooie did not starve is one of the mysteries of Our Square, though
+by no means the only one of its kind. I have a notion that the Bonnie
+Lassie, to whom any variety of want or helplessness is its own
+sufficient recommendation, drummed up trade for him among her uptown
+friends. Something certainly enlisted his gratitude, for he invariably
+took off his frowsy cap when he passed her house, whether or not she was
+there to see, and he once unbosomed himself to me to the extent of
+declaring that she was a kind lady. This is the only commentary I ever
+heard him make upon any one in Our Square, which in turn completely
+ignored him until the development of his love affair stimulated our
+condescending and contemptuous interest.
+
+The object of Plooie's addresses was a little Swiss of unknown
+derivation and obscure history. She appeared to be as detached from the
+surrounding world as the umbrella-mender himself. An insignificant bit
+of a thing she was, anaemic and subdued, with a sad little face, soft
+hazel eyes slightly crossed, and the deprecating manner of those who
+scrub other people's doorsteps at fifteen cents an hour.
+
+For a year their courtship, if such it might be termed, ran an
+uneventful course. I had almost said unromantic. But who shall tell
+where is fancy bred or wherein romance consists? Whenever Plooie saw the
+drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open
+the conversation according to an invariable formula.
+
+"Annie oombrella for mend? Annie oombrella?" Thereby the little Swiss
+became known as, and ever will be called locally, "Annie Oombrella."
+Like most close-knit, centripetal communities, we have a fatal penchant
+for nicknames in Our Square.
+
+She would look up and smile wanly, and shake her head. Where, indeed,
+should the like of her get an umbrella to be mended!
+
+Then would he say--I shall not attempt to torture the good English
+alphabet into a reproduction of his singular phonetics: "It makes fine
+to-day, it do!"
+
+And she would reply "Yes, a fine day"; and look as if the sun were a
+little warmer upon her pale skin because of Plooie's greeting, as,
+perhaps, indeed, it was.
+
+After that he would nod solemnly, or, if feeling especially loquacious,
+venture some prophecy concerning the morrow, before resuming his
+unproductive rounds and his lugubrious yawp. One day he discovered that
+she spoke French. From that time the relationship advanced rapidly. On
+Christmas he gave her a pair of red woolen gloves. On New Year's he took
+her walking among the tombstones in God's Acre, which is a serious and
+sentimental, not to say determinative, social step. Twice in the
+following week he carried her bucket from house to house. And in the
+glowing dusk of a crisp winter afternoon they sat together hand in hand,
+on a bench back of my habitual seat, and looked in each other's eyes,
+and spoke, infrequently, in their own language, forgetful of the rest of
+the world, including myself, who was, perhaps, supposed not to
+understand. But even without hearing their words, I could have guessed.
+It was very simple and direct, and rather touching. Plooie said:
+
+"If one marries themselves?"
+
+And she replied: "I believe it well."
+
+They kissed solemnly, and their faces, in the gleam of the electric
+light which at that moment spluttered into ill-timed and tactless
+activity, were transfigured so that I marveled at the dim splendor
+of them.
+
+But the Bonnie Lassie was scandalized. On general principles she
+mistrusts that any marriage is really made in heaven unless she acts as
+earthly agent of it. What had those two poverty-stricken little
+creatures to marry on? She put the question rhetorically to Our Square
+in general and to the two people most concerned in particular. Courts of
+law might have rejected their replies as irrelevant. Humanly, however,
+they were convincing enough.
+
+Said Plooie: "Who will have a care of that little one if I have not?"
+
+Said Annie Oombrella: "He is so lonely!"
+
+So those two unfortunates united their misfortunes, and lo! happiness
+came of it. Luckily that is all that did come of it. What disposition
+the pair would have made of children, had any arrived, it is difficult
+to conjecture. Only by miraculous compression of ribs, handles, and
+fabrics was space contrived in the basement cubbyhole for Annie
+Oombrella to squeeze in. However, she set up housekeeping cheerily as a
+bird, with an odd lot of pots and pans which Schepstein had picked up at
+an auction and resold to them at not more than two hundred per cent
+profit, plus a kerosene stove, the magnificent wedding gift of the
+Bonnie Lassie and her husband, Cyrus the Gaunt. Twice a week they had
+meat. They were rising in the social scale.
+
+Habitude is the real secret of tolerance. As we became accustomed to
+Plooie, Our Square ceased to resent his invincible outlandishness; we
+endured him with equanimity, although it would be exaggeration to say
+that we accepted him, and we certainly did not patronize him
+professionally. Nevertheless, in a minor degree, he nourished. Annie
+Oombrella must have lavished care upon him. His pinched-in shoulders
+broadened perceptibly. His gait, still a halting shuffle, grew
+noticeably brisker. There was even a heartier note in his lamentable
+trade cry:
+
+"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder!"
+
+As for Annie Oombrella, having some one to look after quite transformed
+her. She grew plump and chirpy, and bustling as a blithe little sparrow,
+though perhaps duck would be a happier comparison, for she was dabbling
+and splashing in water all the day long, making the stairs and porches
+of her curatorship fairly glisten with cleanliness. Her rates went up to
+twenty cents an hour. There were rumors that she had started a savings
+account. Life stretched out before the little couple, smooth and
+peaceful and sunny with companionship.
+
+Then came the war.
+
+The calamitous quality of a great world tragedy is that it brings to so
+many helpless little folk bitter and ignoble tragedies of shame and
+humiliation and misunderstanding. With a few racial exceptions, Our
+Square was vehemently pro-Ally. In spirit we fought with valiant France
+and prayed for heroic Belgium. What a Godspeed we gave to the few sons
+of Gaul who, in those early days, left us to fight the good fight! How
+sourly we looked upon Plooie continuing his peaceful rounds. Whence
+arose the rumor, I cannot say, but it was noised about just at that time
+of wrath and tension that Plooie was born in Liège. Liège, that city of
+fire and slaughter and heroism, upon which the eyes and hopes of the
+world were turned in wonder and admiration. Somebody had seen the entry
+on the marriage register! The Bonnie Lassie told me of it, pausing at my
+bench with a little furrow between her bright eyes.
+
+"Dominie, you know Emile Garin pretty well?"
+
+"Not at all," I replied, failing to identify the rickety Plooie by his
+rightful name.
+
+"Of course you do! Never a morning but he stops at your bench and asks
+if you have an umbrella to mend."
+
+"I never have. What of him?"
+
+"Have you any influence with him?"
+
+"Not compared with yours."
+
+The Bonnie Lassie made a little gesture of despair. "I can't find him.
+And Annie Oombrella won't tell me where he is. She only cries."
+
+"That's bad. You think he--he is--"
+
+"Why don't you say it outright, Dominie? _You_ think he's hiding."
+
+"Really!" I expostulated. "You come to me with accusations against the
+poor fellow and then undertake to make me responsible for them."
+
+"I don't believe it's true at all," averred the Bonnie Lassie loyally.
+"I don't believe Plooie is a coward. There's some reason why he doesn't
+go over and help! I want to know what it is."
+
+Perceiving that I was expected to provide excuses for the erring one, I
+did my best. "Over age," I suggested.
+
+"He's only thirty-two."
+
+"Bless me! He looks sixty. Well--physical infirmity."
+
+"He can carry a load all day."
+
+"He won't leave Annie Oombrella, then. Or perhaps she won't let him."
+
+"When I asked her, she cried harder than ever and said that her mother
+was French and she would go and fight herself, if they'd have her."
+
+"Then I give it up. What does your Olympian wisdom make of it?"
+
+"I don't know. But I'm afraid the Garins are going to have trouble."
+
+Within a few days Plooie reappeared and his strident falsetto appeal for
+trade rang shrill in the space of Our Square. Trouble developed at once.
+Small boys booed at him, called him "yellow," and advised him to go
+carefully, there was a German behind the next tree. Henri Dumain, our
+little old French David who fought the tragic duel of tooth and claw
+with his German Jonathan in Thornsen's Élite Restaurant, stung him with
+that most insulting word in any known tongue--"Lâche!"--and threatened
+him with uplifted cane; and poor Plooie slunk away. But I think it was
+the fact that he who stayed at home when others went forward had set a
+picture of Albert of Belgium in the window of his cubbyhole that most
+exasperated us against him. Tactless, to say the least! His call grew
+quavery and furtive. Annie Oombrella ceased to sing at work. Matters
+looked ill for the Garins.
+
+The evil came to a head the week after David and Jonathan broke off all
+relations. Perhaps that tragedy of shattered friendship (afterward
+rejoined through the agency of the great peacemaker, Death) had got on
+our nerves. Ordinarily, had Plooie chased a small boy who had tipped a
+barrel down his basement steps, nothing would have come of it. But the
+chase took him into the midst of a group of the younger and more
+boisterous element, returning from a business meeting of the Gentlemen's
+Sons of Avenue B, and before he could turn, they had surrounded him.
+
+"Here's our little 'ee-ro!" "Looka the Frenchy that won't fight!"
+"Safety first, hey, Plooie?" "Charge umbrellas--backward, march!"
+
+Plooie did his best to break for a run through, which was the worst
+thing he could have tried. They collared him. By that contact he became
+their captive, their prey. What to do with him? To loose a prisoner,
+once in the hand, is an unthinkable anti-climax. Somebody developed an
+inspirational thought: "Ride him on a rail!"
+
+Near by, a house front under repair supplied a scantling. Plooie was
+hustled upon it. He fell off. They jammed him back again. He clung,
+wide-eyed, white-faced, and silent. The mob, for it was that now, bore
+him with jeers and jokes and ribaldry along the edge of the park.
+
+When they came within my ken he was riding high, and the mob was being
+augmented momentarily from every quarter. I looked about for Terry the
+Cop. But Terry was elsewhere. It is not beyond the bounds of reasonable
+probability that he had absented himself on purpose. "God hates a
+coward" is a tenet of Terry's creed. I confess to a certain sympathy
+with it myself. After all, a harsh lesson might not be amiss for Plooie,
+the recusant. Composing my soul to a non-intervention policy, I leaned
+back on my bench, when a pitiful sight ruined my neutrality.
+
+Along the outer edge of the compact mob trotted little Annie Oombrella.
+From time to time she dashed herself blindly against that human wall,
+which repulsed her not too roughly and with indulgent laughter. Their
+concern was not with her. It was with the coward; their prisoner,
+delivered by fate to the stern decrees of mob justice. I could hear his
+voice now, calling out to her in their own language across the
+supervening heads:
+
+"Do not have fear, my little one. They do me no harm. Go you home,
+little cat. Soon I come also. Do not fear."
+
+From his forehead ran a little stream of blood. But there was that in
+his face which told me that if he was fearful it was only for her. His
+voice, steady and piercing, overrode the clamor of the crowd. I began to
+entertain doubts as to his essential cowardice.
+
+Annie Oombrella, dumb with misery and terror, only dashed herself the
+more hopelessly against the barrier of bodies.
+
+Even the delight of rail-riding a victim becomes monotonous in time. The
+many-headed sought further measures of correction and reprobation.
+
+"Le's tar-and-feather him."
+
+"White feathers!"
+
+"Where'll we gettum?"
+
+"Satkins's kosher shop on the Av'noo."
+
+"Where's yer tar?"
+
+This was a poser; Satkins was saved from a raid. A more practical
+expedient now evolved from the collective brain.
+
+"Duck'm in the fountain!"
+
+"_Drown_ him in the fountain!" amended an enthusiast.
+
+Whooping with delight, the mob turned toward the gate. This was becoming
+dangerous. That there was no real intent to drown the unfortunate
+umbrella-mender I was well satisfied. But mob intent is subject to mob
+impulse. If they once got him into the water, the temptation of the
+playful to push his head under just once more might be too strong.
+Plainly the time was ripe for intervention.
+
+Owing to some enthusiastically concerted but ill-directed engineering,
+the scantling with its human burden had jammed crosswise of the posts.
+Now, if ever, was the opportunity for eloquence of dissuasion.
+
+For the heroic rôle of Horatius at the Bridge I am ill-fitted both by
+temperament and the fullness of years. Nevertheless, I advanced into the
+imminent deadly breach and raised the appeal to reason.
+
+The result was unsatisfactory. Some hooted. Others laughed.
+
+"Never mind the Dominie," yelled Inky Mike, laying hold of the rail by
+an end and hauling it around. "He don't mean nothin'."
+
+Old bones are no match for young barbarism. The rush through the gate
+brushed me aside like a feather. I saw the tragi-comic parade go by, as
+I leaned against a supporting tree: the advance guard of clamorous
+urchins, the rail-bearers, the white-faced figure of Plooie, jolted
+aloft, bleeding but calm, self-forgetful, and still calling out
+reassurances to his wife; the jostling rabble, and upon the edge of it a
+frantic woman, clawing, sobbing, imploring. On they swept. I listened
+for the splash.
+
+It did not come.
+
+A lion had risen in the path. To be more accurate, a lioness. To my
+unsuccessful rôle of Horatius, a Horatia better fitted for the fray had
+succeeded, in the austere and superb person of Madame Rachel Pinckney
+Pemberton Tallafferr, aforetime of the sovereign State of Virginia.
+
+Where all my eloquence had failed, she checked that joyously
+anticipative rabble by the simple query, set in the chillest and most
+peremptory of aristocratic tones, as to what they were doing.
+
+I like to think--the Bonnie Lassie says that I am flattering myself
+thereby--that it was the momentary halt caused by my abortive effort to
+hold the gate, which gave time for a greater than my humble self to
+intervene.
+
+Madame Tallafferr, in the glory of black silk, the Pinckney lace, the
+Pemberton diamond, and accompanied by that fat relic of slavery, Black
+Sally, had been taking the air genteelly on a bench when the disturbance
+grated upon her sensitive ear.
+
+"What is that rabble about, Sally?" she inquired.
+
+The aged negress reconnoitered. "Reckon dey's ridin' a gentmun on a
+rail," she reported.
+
+"A _gentleman_, Sally? Impossible. No gentleman would endure such an
+affront. Look again."
+
+"Yessum. It's dat po' white trash dey call Plooie. Mainded yo' umbrella
+oncet."
+
+"My umbrella-mender!" (The mere fact that the victim had once tinkered
+for her a decrepit parasol entitled him in her feudal mind to the high
+protection of the Tallafferr tradition.) "Tell them to desist at once."
+
+Apologetically but shrewdly Sally opined that the neighborhood of the
+advancing mob was "no place foh a niggah."
+
+With perfect faith in the powers of her superior she added: "You desist
+'em, mist'ess."
+
+Sally's confidence in her mistress was equaled or perhaps even excelled
+by her mistress's confidence in herself.
+
+Leaning upon her cane and attended by the faithful though terrified
+servitor, Madame Tallafferr rustled forward. She took her stand upon the
+brink of the fountain in almost the exact spot where she had disarmed
+MacLachan, the tailor, drunk, songful, and suicidal, two years before.
+Since that feat an almost mythologic awe had attached itself to
+her locally.
+
+She waited, small and thin, hawk-eyed, imperious, and tempered like
+steel. The ring of tempered steel, too, was in her voice when, at the
+proper moment, she raised it.
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+The clamor of the mob died down. The sight of Horatia (I beg her pardon
+humbly, Madame Tallafferr) in the path smote them with misgivings. As in
+Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried
+'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!" That single hale and fiery old
+lady held them. No more could those two hundred ruffians have defied the
+challenge of her contemptuous eyes than they could have advanced into
+the flaming doors of a furnace.
+
+A cautious voice from the rear inquired: "Who's the dame?"
+
+"She's a witch," conjectured some one.
+
+"It's the Duchess," said another, giving her the local title of
+veneration.
+
+"It's the lady that shot the tailor," proclaimed an awe-stricken
+bystander. (Legend takes strange twists in Our Square as elsewhere.)
+Some outlander, ignorant of our traditions, prescribed in a
+malevolent squeak:
+
+"T'row 'er in the drink."
+
+"Who spoke?" said Madame Tallafferr, crisp and clear.
+
+Silence. Then the sound of objurgations as the advocate frantically
+resisted well-meant efforts to thrust him into undesirable prominence.
+Finally a miniature eruption outward from the mob's edge, followed by a
+glimpse of a shadowy figure departing at full speed. The Duchess leveled
+a bony finger at Inky Mike, the nearest figure personally known to her,
+who began a series of contortions suggestive of a desire to crawl into
+his own pocket.
+
+"Michael," said the Duchess.
+
+"Yessum," said Inky Mike, whose name happens to be Moe Sapperstein.
+
+"What are you doing to that unfortunate person?"
+
+"J-j-just a little j-j-joke," replied the other in what was doubtless
+intended for a light-hearted and care-free tone.
+
+"Let him down." Inky Mike hesitated. "At once!" snapped the Duchess and
+stamped her foot.
+
+"Yessum," said Inky Mike meekly.
+
+Loosing his hold on the scantling, he retreated upon the feet of those
+behind. They let go also. Plooie slid forward to the ground. Madame
+Tallafferr's bony finger (backed by the sparkle of an authoritative
+diamond) swept slowly around a half-circle, with very much the easy and
+significant motion of a machine gun and something of the effect. A
+subtle suggestion of limpness manifested itself in the mass before her.
+Addressing them, she raised her voice not a whit. She had no need to.
+
+"Go about your business," she said. "Rabble!" she added in precisely the
+tone which one might expect of a well-bred but particularly
+deadly snake.
+
+The mob wilted to a purposeless and abashed crowd. The crowd
+disintegrated into individuals. The individuals asked themselves what
+they were doing there, and, finding no sufficient answer, slunk away.
+Plooie was triumphantly escorted by Madame Tallafferr and Black Sally,
+and (less triumphantly) by my limping self, to the nearest haven, which
+chanced to be the Bonnie Lassie's house. Annie Oombrella pattered along
+beside him, fumbling his hand and trying not to cry.
+
+But when the Bonnie Lassie saw the melancholy wreck, _she_ cried, as
+much from fury as from pity, and said that men were brutes and bullies
+and cowards and imbeciles--and why hadn't her Cyrus been at home to stop
+it? Whereto Madame Tallafferr complacently responded that Mr. Cyrus
+Staten had not been needed: the _canaille_ would always respect a proper
+show of authority from its superiors; and so went home, rustling and
+sparkling.
+
+After all, Plooie was not much hurt. Perhaps more frightened than
+anything else. Panic was, in fact, the reason generally ascribed in Our
+Square for his quiet departure, with his Annie, of course, on the
+following Sunday. Only the Bonnie Lassie dissented. But as the Bonnie
+Lassie reasons with her heart instead of her head, we accept her
+theories with habitual and smiling indulgence rather than respect--until
+the facts bear them out. She had, it appeared, called on the Plooies to
+inquire as to their proposed course, and had rather more than hinted
+that if the head of the house wished to respond to his country's call,
+Our Square would look after Annie Oombrella. To this he returned only a
+stubborn and somber silence. The Bonnie Lassie said afterward that he
+seemed ashamed. She added that he had left good-bye for me and hoped the
+Dominie would not think too hard of him. Recalling that I had rather
+markedly failed to acknowledge his salute on the morning before his
+departure, I felt a qualm of misgiving. After all, judging your
+neighbor's soul is a kittle business. There is such an insufficiency
+of data.
+
+So Schepstein lost a renter. The basement cubbyhole remained vacant,
+with only the picture of Albert of the Kingdom of Sorrows in the window
+as a memento. Nothing further was seen or heard of Plooie. But
+Schepstein, wandering far afield in search of tenement sales a full year
+after, encountered Annie Oombrella washing down the steps of an office
+far over in Lewis Street, nearly to the river. All the plumpness which
+she had taken on in the happy days was gone. She looked wistful
+and haggard.
+
+Schepstein, doing the polite (which, as he accurately states, costs
+nothing and might get you something some time), asked after Plooie.
+Where was he? Annie Oombrella shook her head.
+
+"Left you, has he?" asked Schepstein, astonished at this evidence of
+iniquity.
+
+"Yes," said Annie Oombrella. But there was a ring in her voice that
+Schepstein failed to understand. It sounded almost like defiance. Her
+eyes were deep-hollowed and sorrowful, but they met his as squarely as
+they could, considering their cast. Schepstein was quite shocked to
+observe that there was no shame in them. I suppose the shock temporarily
+unbalanced his principles, for, having caught sight of one of her shoes,
+he offered to lend her three dollars, indefinitely and without interest,
+on her bare note-of-hand. (When he saw the other shoe, he made it five.)
+She looked at the money anxiously, but shook her head.
+
+"Well, if you ever need a home, the basement's vacant and there ain't a
+better basement in Our Square."
+
+Annie Oombrella began to cry quietly, and Schepstein went on about his
+business.
+
+Through the ensuing years many women cried quietly or vehemently,
+according to their natures, and many men went away from places that had
+known them, to be no more known of those places; and the little Kingdom
+of Sorrows, shattered, blood-soaked, and unconquerable, stood fast, a
+bulwark between the ravager of the world and his victory until there
+sped across the death-haunted seas the army that was to turn the scales.
+Our Square gave to that sacrifice what it can never recover: witness the
+simple memorials in Our Square.
+
+Many people see ghosts; Our Square is well haunted, as befits its
+ancient and diminished glories. Few hear ghosts. This is as it ought to
+be. In their very nature, ghosts should be seen, not heard. Yet, in the
+year of grace, 1919, under a blazing September sun, with a cicada,
+vagrant from heaven knows whence, frying his sizzling sausages in our
+lilac bush, and other equally insistent sounds of reality filling the
+air, my ears were smitten with a voice from the realm of wraiths.
+
+"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees," it cried on a faint and cluttering note.
+"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder."
+
+Over in the far corner of the park an apparition moved into my visual
+range. It looked like Plooie. It moved like Plooie. It was loaded like
+Plooie. It opened a mouth like Plooie's and emitted again the familiar
+though diminished falsetto shriek. No doubt of it now; it _was_ Plooie.
+He had come back to us who never thought to see him again, who never
+wished to see him again, still unpurged of his stigma.
+
+As he passed me, I acknowledged his greeting, somewhat stiffly, I fear,
+and walked over to Schepstein's. There in the basement, amid the
+familiar wreckage as of a thousand umbrellas, sat little Annie.
+
+"Bonjour, Dominie," said she wistfully.
+
+"Good-morning, Annie. So you are back."
+
+"Yes, Dominie. Is there need that one wash the step at your house?"
+
+"There is need that one explain one's self. What have you been doing
+these three years?"
+
+"I work. I work hard."
+
+"And your husband? What has he been doing?" I asked sternly.
+
+Annie Oombrella's soft face drooped. "Soyez gentil, Dominie," she
+implored. "Be a kind, good man and ask him not. That make him so
+triste--so sad."
+
+"He doesn't look well, Annie."
+
+"He have been ver' seeck. Now we come home he is already weller."
+
+"But do you think it is wise for you to come back here?" I demanded,
+feeling brutal as I put the question. Annie Oombrella's reply did not
+make me feel any less so. She sent a quivering look around that
+unspeakably messy, choked-up little hole in the wall that was home to
+Plooie and her.
+
+"We have loved each other so much here," said she.
+
+Our Square is too poor to be enduringly uncharitable, either in deed or
+thought. War's resentments died out quickly in us. No longer was Plooie
+in danger of mob violence. By common consent we let him alone; he made
+his rounds unmolested, but also unpatronized. But for Annie Oombrella's
+prodigies of industry with pail and brush, the little couple in
+Schepstein's basement would have fared ill.
+
+Annie earned for both. In the process, happiness came back to her face.
+
+To the fat Rosser twin accrues the credit of a pleasurable discovery
+about Plooie. This was that, if you sneaked softly up behind him and
+shouted: "Hey, Plooie! What was _you_ doing in the war?" his jaw would
+drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his
+burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and
+sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly
+developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of exercise, first
+and last.
+
+Eventually he foiled them by coming out only in school hours. This
+didn't help his trade. But then his trade had dwindled to the vanishing
+point anyway. Even Madame Tallafferr had dropped him. She preferred not
+to deal with a poltroon, as she put it.
+
+On the day of the great exodus, Plooie put in some extra hours. He was
+in no danger from his youthful persecutors, because they had all gone up
+to line Fifth Avenue and help cheer the visiting King of the Belgians.
+So had such of the rest of Our Square as were not at work. The place was
+practically deserted. Nevertheless, Plooie prowled about, uttering his
+cracked and lugubrious cry in the forlorn hope of picking up a parapluie
+to raccommode. I was one of the few left to hear him, because Mendel,
+the jeweler, had most inconsiderately gone to view royalty, leaving my
+unrepaired glasses locked in his shop; otherwise I, too, would have been
+on the Fifth Avenue curb shouting with the best of them. Do not
+misinterpret me. For the divinity that doth hedge a king I care as
+little as one should whose forbears fought in the Revolution. But for
+the divinity of high courage and devotion that certifies to the image of
+God within man, I should have been proud to take off my old but still
+glossy silk hat to Albert of the Belgians. So I was rather cross, and it
+was well for my equanimity that the Bonnie Lassie, who had remained at
+home for reasons which are peculiarly her own affair and that of Cyrus
+the Gaunt, should have come over to my favorite bench to cheer me up.
+Said the Bonnie Lassie:
+
+"I wonder why Plooie didn't go to see his king."
+
+"Sense of shame," I suggested acidly.
+
+"Yes?" said the Bonnie Lassie in a tone which I mistrusted.
+
+"It is no use," I assured her, "for you to favor me with that pitying
+and contemptuous smile of yours, for I can't see it. Mendel has my
+nearer range of vision locked in his shop."
+
+"I was just thinking," said the Bonnie Lassie in ruminant accents, "how
+nice it must be to look back on a long life of unspotted correctness
+with not an item in it to be ashamed of. It gives one such a comfortable
+basis for sitting in judgment."
+
+"Her lips drip honey," I observed, "and the poison of asps is under her
+tongue."
+
+"Your quotations are fatally mixed," retorted my companion.
+
+From across the park sounded Plooie's patient falsetto:
+"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees! Annie Oombrella for mend? Parapluie-ee-ee-" The
+call broke off in a kind of choke.
+
+"What's happened to Plooie?" I asked. "The youngsters can't have got
+back from the parade already, have they?"
+
+"A very tall man has stopped him," said the Bonnie Lassie. "Plooie has
+dropped his kit.... He's trying to salute.... It must be one of the
+Belgian officers.... Oh, Dominie!"
+
+"Well, what?" I demanded impatiently and cursed the recreant Mendel in
+my heart.
+
+"It can't be ... you don't think they can be arresting poor Plooie at
+this late day for evading service?"
+
+"Serve him right if they did," said I.
+
+"I believe they are. The big man has taken him by the arm and is leading
+him along. Poor Plooie! He's all wilted down. It's a shame!" cried the
+Bonnie Lassie, beginning to flame. "It ought not to be allowed."
+
+"Probably they're taking him away. Do you see an official-looking
+automobile anywhere about?"
+
+"There's a strange car over on the Avenue. Oh, dear! Poor Annie
+Oombrella! But--but they're not going there. They're going into
+Schepstein's basement."
+
+I could feel the Bonnie Lassie fidgeting on the bench. For a moment I
+endured it. Then I said:
+
+"Well, Lassie, why don't you?"
+
+"Why don't I what?"
+
+"Take your usual constitutional, over by the railings. Opposite
+Schepstein's."
+
+"That isn't my usual constitutional, and you know it, Dominie," said the
+Bonnie Lassie with dignity.
+
+"Isn't it? Well, curiosity killed a cat, you know."
+
+"How shamelessly you garble! It was--"
+
+"Never mind; the quotation is erroneous, anyway. It should be:
+_suppressed_ curiosity killed a cat."
+
+The Bonnie Lassie sniffed.
+
+"Rather than be dislodged from my precarious perch on this bench," I
+pursued, "through the trembling imparted to it by your clinging to the
+back to restrain yourself from going to see what is up, I should almost
+prefer that you would go--and peek."
+
+"Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie, "you are a despicable old man....
+I'll be back in a minute."
+
+"Don't stay long," I pleaded. "Pity the blind."
+
+Her golden laughter floated back to me. But there was no mirth in her
+voice when she returned.
+
+"It's so dark in there I can hardly see. But the big man is sitting on a
+pile of ribs talking to Plooie, and Annie Oombrella's face is all
+swollen with crying. I saw it in the window for a minute."
+
+Pro and con we argued what the probable event might be and how we could
+best meet it. So intent upon our discussion did we become that we did
+not note the approach of a stranger until he was within a few paces of
+the bench. With my crippled vision I apprehended him only as very tall
+and straight and wearing a loose cape. The effect upon the Bonnie Lassie
+of his approach was surprising. I heard her give a little gasp. She got
+up from the bench. Her hand fell upon my shoulder. It was trembling.
+Where, I wondered, had those two met and in what circumstances, that the
+mere sight of the stranger caused such emotion in the unusually
+self-controlled wife of Cyrus Staten. The man spoke quickly in a deep
+and curiously melancholy voice:
+
+"Madame perhaps does me the honor to remember me?"
+
+"I--I--I--" began the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"The Comte de Tournon. At Trouville we met, was it not? Several years
+since?"
+
+"Y-yes. Certainly. At Trouville."
+
+(Now I happen to know that the Bonnie Lassie has never been at
+Trouville, which did not assuage my suspicions.)
+
+"You are friends of my--countryman, Emile Garin, are you not?" he
+pursued in his phraseology of extreme precision, with only the faint
+echo of an accent.
+
+"Who?" I said. "Oh, Plooie, you mean. Friends? Well, acquaintances would
+be more accurate."
+
+"He tells me that you, Monsieur, befriended him when he had great need
+of friends. And you, Madame, always. So I have come to thank you."
+
+"You are interested in Plooie?" I asked.
+
+"Plooie?" he repeated doubtfully. I explained to him and he laughed
+gently. "Profoundly interested," he said. "I have here one of his finest
+umbrellas which his good wife presented to me. There was also a lady of
+whom he speaks, a _grande dame_, of very great authority." For all the
+sadness of the deep voice, I felt that his eyes were twinkling.
+
+"Madame Tallafferr," supplied the Bonnie Lassie. "She is away on a
+visit."
+
+"I should like to have met that queller of mobs. She ought to be
+knighted."
+
+"Knighthood would add nothing to her status," said I, dryly. "She is a
+Pinckney and a Pemberton besides being a Tallafferr, with two _f_s, two
+_l_s, and two _r_s."
+
+"Doubtless. I do not comprehend the details of your American orders of
+merit," said the big sad-voiced man courteously. "But I should have been
+proud to meet her."
+
+"May I tell her that?" asked the Bonnie Lassie eagerly.
+
+"By all means--when I am gone." Again I felt the smile that must be in
+the eyes. "But there were others here, not so friendly to the little
+Garin. That is true, is it not?"
+
+"Yes," said the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"There is at least a strong suspicion that he is not a deserving case,"
+I pointed out defensively.
+
+"Then it is only because he does not explain himself well," returned the
+Belgian quickly.
+
+"He does not explain himself at all," I corrected. "Nor does Annie
+Oom--his wife."
+
+"Ah? That will clarify itself, perhaps, in time. If you will bear with
+me, I should like to tell you a little story to be passed on to those
+who are not his friends. Will you not be seated, Madame?"
+
+The Bonnie Lassie resumed her place on the bench. Standing before us,
+the big man began to speak. Many times since have I wished that I might
+have taken down what he said verbatim; so gracious it was, so simple, so
+straightly the expression of a great and generous personality.
+
+"Emile Garin," he said, "was a son of Belgium. He was poor and his
+people were little folk of nothing-at-all. Moreover, they were dead. So
+he came to your great country to make his living. When our enemies
+invaded my country and the call went out to all sons of Belgium, the
+little Garin was ashamed because he knew that he was physically unfit
+for military service. But he tried. He tried everywhere. In the mornings
+they must sweep him away from our Consul-General's doorsteps here
+because otherwise he would not--You spoke, Monsieur?"
+
+"Nothing. I only said, 'God forgive us!'"
+
+"Amen," said the narrator gravely. "Everywhere they rejected him as
+unfit. So he became morbid. He hid himself away. Is it not so?"
+
+"That is why they left Our Square so mysteriously," confirmed the Bonnie
+Lassie.
+
+"After that he hung about the docks. He saw his chance and crawled into
+the hold of a vessel as a stowaway. He starved. It did not matter. He
+was kicked. It did not matter. He was arrested. It did not matter.
+Nothing mattered except that he should reach Belgium. And he did reach
+my country at the darkest hour, the time when Belgium needed every man,
+no matter who he was. But he could not be a soldier, the little Garin,
+because he was unable to march. He had weak legs."
+
+At this point the eternal feminine asserted itself in the Bonnie Lassie.
+"I _told_ you there was something," she murmured triumphantly.
+
+"Hush!" said I.
+
+"I am glad to find that he had one true defender here," pursued the
+biographer of Plooie. "Though he could not fight in the ranks there was
+use for him. There was use for all true sons of Belgium in those black
+days. He was made driver of a--a charette; I do not know if you have
+them in your great city?" He paused, and I guessed that the rumble of
+heavy wheels on the asphalt, heard near by, had come opportunely. "Ah,
+yes; there is one."
+
+"A dump-cart," supplied the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"Merci, Madame. A dump-cart. It is perhaps not an evidently glorious
+thing to drive a dump-cart for one's country--unless one makes it so.
+But it was the best the little Garin could do. His legs were what you
+call quaint--I have already told you. He was faithful and hard-working.
+They helped build roads near the front, the little Garin and his
+big cart."
+
+"Not precisely safety-first," whispered the Bonnie Lassie to me,
+maliciously.
+
+"You are interrupting the story," said I with dignity.
+
+"One day he was driving a load of mud through a village street. Here on
+this side is a hospital. There on that side is another hospital. Down
+the middle of the road walks an idiot of a sergeant carrying a new type
+of grenade with which we were experimenting. One moves a little
+lever--so. One counts; one, two, three, four, five. One throws the
+grenade, and at the count of ten, all about it is destroyed, for it is
+of terrible power. The idiot sergeant sets down the grenade in the
+middle of the road between the two hospitals full of the helplessly
+wounded. For what? Perhaps to sneeze. Perhaps to light a cigarette.
+Heaven only knows, for the sergeant has the luck to be killed next day
+by a German shell, before he can be court-martialed. As he sets down the
+grenade, the little lever is moved. The sergeant loses his head. He
+runs, shouting to everybody to run also.
+
+"But the hospitals, they cannot run. And the wounded, they cannot run.
+They can only be still and wait. In the nearest hospital there is a
+visitor. A great lady. A great and greatly loved lady." The sad voice
+deepened and softened.
+
+"I know," whispered the Bonnie Lassie; "I can guess."
+
+"Yes. But the little Garin, approaching on his big dump-cart, does not
+know. He knows the danger, for he hears the shouts and sees the people
+escaping. He sees the grenade, too. A man running past him shouts, 'Turn
+your cart, you fool, and save yourself.' Oh, yes; he can save himself.
+That is easy. But what of the people in the hospitals? Who can save
+them? The little Garin thinks hard and swiftly. He drives his big
+dump-cart over the grenade. He pulls the lever which dumps the mud. The
+mud buries the grenade; much mud, very soft and heavy. The grenade
+explodes, nevertheless.
+
+"One mule blows through one hospital, one through another. Everything
+near is covered with mud. The great lady is thrown to the floor, but she
+is not hurt. She rises and attends the injured and calms the terrified.
+The hospitals are saved. It is a glorious thing to have driven a
+dump-cart for one's country--so."
+
+"But what became of our Plooie?" besought the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+The big man spread his arms in a wide, Gallic gesture. "They looked for
+him everywhere. No sign. But by and by some one saw a quite large piece
+of mud on the hospital roof begin to wriggle. The little Garin was that
+large piece of mud. They brought him down and put him in the hospital
+which he had saved. For a long time he had shell-shock. Even now he
+cannot speak of the war without his nerves being affected. When he got
+out of hospital, he did not seem to know who he was. Or perhaps he did
+not care. Shell-shock is a strange thing. He went away, and his records
+were lost in the general confusion. Afterward we sought for him. The
+great lady wished very much to see him. But we could find nothing except
+that he had come back to this country. Official inquiry was made here
+and he was traced to Our Square. So I came to see him. Because he cannot
+speak for himself and will not allow his wife to tell his story--it is
+part of the shell-shock which will wear off in time--I came to speak
+for him."
+
+"Does your--do you do this sort of thing often?" asked the Bonnie Lassie
+with a queer sort of resonance in her voice.
+
+The big man answered, in a tone which suggested that he was smiling:
+"One cannot visit all the brave men who suffered for Belgium. But there
+is a special reason here, the matter of the great and greatly loved lady
+whom the little Garin saved."
+
+"I see," said the Bonnie Lassie softly.
+
+After the big man had made his adieux, we sat silent for some minutes.
+Presently she spoke; there was wonder and something else in her voice.
+
+"Plooie!" she said, and that was all.
+
+"You are crying," I said.
+
+"I'm not," she retorted indignantly. "But you ought to be. For your
+injustice."
+
+"If we all bewept our injustices," said I oracularly, "Noah would have
+to come back and build a new ark for a bigger flood than his."
+
+"What do you think of him?" said the Bonnie Lassie.
+
+"As a weather-prophet, he was unequaled. As an expert animal-breeder,
+his selections were at times ill-advised."
+
+"Don't be tiresome, Dominie. You know that I'm not interested in Noah."
+
+"As to our romantic visitant," I said, "I think that Cyrus the Gaunt
+would better be watchful. I've never known anyone else except Cyrus to
+produce such an emotional effect upon you."
+
+"Don't be school-girlish!" admonished the Bonnie Lassie severely. "Poor
+old Dominie! He doesn't know what's going on under his very nose. Where
+are your eyes?"
+
+"In Mendel's top drawer, I suppose.... The question is how are we going
+to make it up to Plooie?"
+
+"I don't think you need worry about that," returned the Bonnie Lassie
+loftily.
+
+Nor was there any occasion for worry. Two days later there occurred an
+irruption of dismaying young men with casual squares of paper in their
+pockets, upon which they scratched brief notes. They were, I was
+subsequently given to understand, the pick and flower of the city's
+reportorial genius. (I could imagine the ghost of Inky Mike with his
+important notebook and high-poised pencil, regarding with wonder and
+disdain their quiet and unimpressive methods.) A freshly painted sign
+across the front of Plooie's basement, was the magnet that drew them:
+
+      Emile Garin & Wife
+  Umbrella Mender & Porch Cleanser
+
+               to
+
+          His Majesty
+
+     The King of the Belgians
+       (By Royal Warranty)
+
+No; Plooie and Annie Oombrella need no help from the humble now. Their
+well-deserved fortune is made.
+
+
+
+TRIUMPH
+
+  The months go by--bleak March and May-day heat--
+  Harvest is over--winter well-nigh done--
+  And still I say, "To-morrow we shall meet."
+
+  MAY PROBYN
+
+The Little Red Doctor sat on the far end of my bench. Snow fringed the
+bristling curve of his mustache. He shivered.
+
+"Dominie," said he, "it's a wild day."
+
+I assented.
+
+"Dominie," said the Little Red Doctor, "it is no kind of a day for an
+old man to be sitting on a bench."
+
+I dissented.
+
+"Dominie," persisted the Little Red Doctor, "you can't deny that you're
+old."
+
+"Whose fault is that but yours?" I retorted.
+
+"Don't try to flatter me," said the Little Red Doctor. "You'd have
+licked my old friend, Death, in that bout you had with him, without any
+help of mine. And, anyway, you were already old, then. You're a tough
+old bird, Dominie. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here in a March
+blizzard staring at the Worth mansion and wondering what really happened
+there three years ago."
+
+"Your old friend, Death, beat you that time," said I maliciously.
+
+The Little Red Doctor chose to ignore my taunt. "Look your fill,
+Dominie," he advised. "You won't have much more chance."
+
+"Why?" I asked, startled.
+
+"The wreckers begin on it next month. Also a nice, new building is going
+up next door to it on that little, secret, walled jungle that Ely Crouch
+used to misname his garden. I'm glad of it, too. I don't like
+anachronisms."
+
+"I'm an anachronism," I returned. "You'll be one pretty soon. Our Square
+is one solid anachronism."
+
+"It won't be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will
+go as the Worth place is going. You'll miss it, Dominie. You love houses
+as if they were people."
+
+It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that
+are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement,
+but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained
+against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by
+habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition,
+pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely
+endured--the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and
+joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old
+houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has
+outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead,
+unhuman thing.
+
+That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably
+with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one
+smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood
+staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy
+square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm
+of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still
+harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.
+
+The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.
+
+"Yes; you're old, Dominie. But you're not wise. You're very foolish.
+Foolish and obstinate."
+
+Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: "Why
+am I foolish and obstinate?"
+
+"Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don't
+you?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Then why did Ned commit suicide?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"How do you explain away his written confession?"
+
+"I don't. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth's character willfully
+to kill an old man. You were his friend; you ought to know it as well
+as I do."
+
+"Ah, that's different," said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his
+queer looks. "Yes; you're a pig-headed old man, Dominie."
+
+"I'm a believer in character."
+
+"I don't know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one.
+He's old, too."
+
+"Gale Sheldon," said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a
+branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of
+Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory
+of the last of the Worths.
+
+"Yes. He's waiting for us now in his rooms. Will you come?"
+
+Perceiving that there was something back of this--there usually is, in
+the Little Red Doctor's maneuvers--I rose and we set out. As we passed
+the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before. There
+was something savage and desperate in its desolation. The cold curse of
+abandonment lay upon it. At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor
+said abruptly.
+
+"She's dead."
+
+"Who?" I demanded.
+
+"The girl. The woman in the case."
+
+"In the Ely Crouch case? A woman? There was never any woman hinted at."
+
+"No. And there never would have been as long as she was alive.
+Now--Well, I'll leave Sheldon to explain her. He loved her, too, in
+his way."
+
+In Gale Sheldon's big, still room, crowded with the friendly ghosts of
+mighty books, a clear fire was burning. One shaded lamp at the desk was
+turned on, for though it was afternoon the blizzard cast a gloom like
+dusk. The Little Red Doctor retired to a far corner where he was all but
+merged in the shadows.
+
+"Have you seen this?" Sheldon asked me, pointing to the table.
+
+Thereon was spread strange literature for the scholarly taste of our
+local book-worm, a section from the most sensational of New York's
+Sunday newspapers. From the front page, surrounded by a barbarous
+conglomeration of headlines and uproarious type, there smiled happily
+forth a face of such appealing loveliness as no journalistic vulgarity
+could taint or profane. I recognized it at once, as any one must have
+done who had ever seen the unforgettable original. It was Virginia
+Kingsley, who, two years before, had been Sheldon's assistant. The
+picture was labeled, "Death Ends Wanderlust of Mysterious Heiress," and
+the article was couched in a like style of curiosity-piquing
+sensationalism. Stripped of its fulsome verbiage, it told of the girl's
+recent death in Italy, after traveling about Europe with an invalid
+sister; during which progress, the article gloated, she was "vainly
+wooed by the Old World's proudest nobility for her beauty and wealth,"
+the latter having been unexpectedly left her by an aged relative. Her
+inexorable refusals were set down, by the romantic journalist, as due to
+some secret and prior attachment. (He termed it an "affair de court"!)
+
+Out of the welter of words there stood forth one sentence to tempt the
+imagination: "She met death as a tryst." For that brief flash the
+reporter had been lifted out of his bathos and tawdriness into a clearer
+element. One could well believe that she had "met death as a tryst." For
+if ever I have beheld unfaltering hope and unflagging courage glorified
+and spiritualized into unearthly beauty, it was there in that pictured
+face, fixed by the imperishable magic of the camera.
+
+"No; I hadn't seen it," I said after reading. "Is it true?"
+
+"In part." Then, after a pause, "You knew her, didn't you, Dominie?"
+
+"Only by sight. She had special charge of the poetry alcove, hadn't
+she?"
+
+"Yes. She belonged there of right. She was the soul and fragrance of all
+that the singers of springtime and youth have sung." He sighed, shaking
+his grizzled head mournfully. "'And all that glory now lies dimmed in
+death.' It doesn't seem believable."
+
+He rose and went to the window. Through the whorls of snow could be
+vaguely seen the outlines of the Worth house, looming on its corner. He
+stared at it musing.
+
+"I've often wondered if she cared for him," he murmured.
+
+"For him? For Worth!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Were they friends?"
+
+"Hardly more than acquaintances, I thought. But she left very strangely
+the day of his death and never came back."
+
+From the physician's corner there came an indeterminate grunt.
+
+"If that is a request for further information, Doctor, I can say that on
+the few occasions when they met here in the library, it was only in the
+line of her duties. He was interested in the twentieth-century poets.
+But even that interest died out. It was months before the--the tragedy
+that he stopped coming to the Library."
+
+"It was months before the tragedy that he stopped going anywhere, wasn't
+it?" I asked.
+
+"Yes. Nobody understood it; least of all, his friends. I even heard it
+hinted that he was suffering from some malady of the brain." He turned
+inquiringly to the far, dim corner.
+
+Out of it the Little Red Doctor barked: "Death had him by the throat."
+
+"Death? In what form?"
+
+"Slow, sure fingers, shutting off his breath. Do you need further
+details or will the dry, scientific term, epithelioma, be enough?" The
+voice came grim out of the gloom. No answer being returned, it
+continued: "I've had easier jobs than telling Ned Worth. It was hopeless
+from the first. My old friend, Death, had too long a start on me."
+
+"Was it something that affected his mind?"
+
+"No. His mind was perfectly clear. Vividly clear. May I take my last
+verdict, when it comes, with a spirit as clear and as noble."
+
+Silence fell, and in the stillness we heard the Little Red Doctor
+communing with memories. Now and then came a muttered word. "Suicide!"
+in a snarl of scornful rejection. "Fool-made definitions!" Presently,
+"Story for a romancer, not a physician." He seemed to be canvassing an
+inadequacy in himself with dissatisfaction. Then, more clearly: "Love
+from the first. At a glance, perhaps. The contagion of flame for powder.
+But in that abyss together they saw each other's soul."
+
+"The Little Red Doctor is turning poet," said Sheldon to me in an
+incredulous whisper.
+
+There was the snap and crackle of a match from the shadowed corner. The
+keen, gnarled young face sprang from the darkness, vivid and softened
+with a strange triumph, then receded behind an imperfect circle, clouded
+the next instant by a nimbus of smoke. The Little Red Doctor spoke.
+
+Ned Worth was my friend as well as my patient. No need to tell you men,
+who knew him, why I was fond of him. I don't suppose any one ever came
+in contact with that fantastic and smiling humanity of his without
+loving him for it. "Immortal hilarity!" The phrase might have been
+coined for him.
+
+It wasn't as physician that I went home with Ned, after pronouncing
+sentence upon him, but as friend. I didn't want him to be alone that
+first night. Yet I dare say that any one, seeing the two of us, would
+have thought me the one who had heard his life-limit defined. He was as
+steady as a rock.
+
+"No danger of my being a miser of life," he said. "You've given me leave
+to spend freely what's left of it." Well, he spent. Freely and
+splendidly!
+
+The spacious old library on the second floor--you know it, Dominie,
+smelt of disuse, as we entered, Ned's servant bringing up the rear with
+a handbag. Dust had settled down like an army of occupation over
+everything. The furniture was shrouded in denim. The tall clock in the
+corner stood voiceless. Three months of desertion will change any house
+into a tomb. And the Worth mansion was never too cheerful, anyway. Since
+the others of the family died, Ned hadn't stayed there long enough at a
+time to humanize it.
+
+Ned's man set down the grip, unstrapped it, took his orders for some
+late purchases, and left to execute them. I went over to open the two
+deep-set windows on the farther side of the room. It was a still, close
+October night, and the late scent of warmed-over earth came up to me out
+of Ely Crouch's garden next door. From where I stood in the broad
+embrasure of the south window, I was concealed from the room. But I
+could see everything through a tiny gap in the hangings. Ned sat at his
+desk sorting some papers. A sort of stern intentness had settled upon
+his face, without marring its curious faun-like beauty. I carry the
+picture in my mind.
+
+"What's become of you, Chris?" he demanded presently. I came out into
+the main part of the room. "Oh, there you are! You'll look after a few
+little matters for me, won't you?" He indicated a sheaf of papers.
+
+"You needn't be in such a hurry," said I with illogical resentment. "It
+isn't going to be to-morrow or next week."
+
+"Isn't it?" Something in his tone made me look at him sharply. "Six
+months or three months or to-morrow," he added, more lightly; "what does
+it matter as long as it's sure! You know, what I appreciate is that you
+gave me the truth straight."
+
+"It's a luxury few of my patients get. Their constitutions won't stand
+it."
+
+"It's a compliment to my nerve. Strangely enough I don't feel nervous
+about it."
+
+"I do. Damnably! About something, anyway. There's something wrong with
+this room, Ned. What is it?"
+
+"Don't you know?" he laughed. "It's the sepulchral silence of Old
+Grandfather Clock, over there. You're looking right at him and wondering
+subconsciously why he doesn't make a noise like Time."
+
+"That's easily remedied." Consulting my watch I set and wound the
+ancient timepiece. Its comfortable iteration made the place at once more
+livable. Immediately it struck the hour.
+
+"Ten o'clock," I said, and parted the draperies at the lower window to
+look out again. "Ten o'clock of a still, cloudy night and--and the devil
+is on a prowl in his garden."
+
+"Meaning my highly respected neighbor and ornament to the local bar, the
+Honorable Ely Crouch?"
+
+"Exactly. Preceded by a familiar spirit in animal form."
+
+"Oh, that's his pet ferret and boon companion."
+
+"Not his only companion. There's some one with him," I said. "A woman."
+
+"I don't admire her taste in romance," said Ned.
+
+"Nor her discretion. You know what they say: 'A dollar or a woman never
+safe alone with Ely Crouch.'"
+
+"My dollars certainly weren't," observed Ned.
+
+"How did he ever defend your suit for an accounting?" I asked.
+
+"Heedlessness on my side, a crooked judge on his. Stop spying on my
+neighbor's flirtations and look here."
+
+I turned and got a shock. The handbag lay open on the desk, surrounded
+by a respectable-sized fortune in bank-notes.
+
+"Pretty much all that the Honorable Ely has left me," he added.
+
+"Is it enough to go on with, Ned?" I asked.
+
+He smiled at me. "Plenty for my time. You forget."
+
+For the moment I had forgotten. "But what on earth are you going to do
+with all that ready cash?"
+
+"Carry out a brilliant idea. I conceived it after you had handed down
+your verdict. Went around to the bank and quietly drew out the lot. I've
+planned a wild and original orgy. A riot of dissipation in giving. Think
+of the fun one can have with that much tangible money. Already to-day
+I've struck one man dumb and reduced another to mental decay, by the
+simple medium of a thousand-dollar bill. Miracles! Declare a vacation,
+Chris, and come with me on my secret and jubilant bat, and we'll
+work wonders."
+
+"And after?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, after! Well, there'll be no further reason for the 'permanent
+possibility of sensation' on my part. That's your precious science's
+best definition of life, I believe. It doesn't appeal to one as alluring
+when the sensation promises to become--well, increasingly unpleasant."
+
+There was no mistaking his meaning. "I can't have that, my son," I
+protested.
+
+"No? That's a purely professional prejudice of yours. Look at it from my
+point of view. Am I to wait to be strangled by invisible hands, rather
+than make an easy and graceful exit? Suicide! The word has no meaning
+for a man in my condition. If you'll tell me there's a chance, one mere,
+remote human chance--" He paused, turning to me with what was almost
+appeal in his glance. How I longed to lie to him! But Ned Worth was the
+kind that you can't lie to. I looked at him standing there so strong and
+fine, with all the mirthful zest of living in his veins, sentenced
+beyond hope, and I thought of those terrible lines of another man
+under doom:
+
+  "I never saw a man who looked
+  So wistfully at the day."
+
+We medical men learn to throw a protective film over our feelings, like
+the veil over the eagle's eye. We have to. But I give you my word, I
+could not trust my voice to answer him.
+
+"You see," he said; "you can't." His hand fell on my arm. "I'm sorry,
+Chris," he said in that winning voice of his; "I shouldn't plague you
+for something that you can't give me."
+
+"I can tell you this, anyway," said I: "that it's something less than
+courage to give up until the time comes. You didn't give your life. You
+haven't the right to take it; anyway, not until its last usefulness
+is over."
+
+He made a movement of impatience.
+
+"Oh, I'm not asking you to endure torture. I'd release you myself from
+that, if it comes to it, in spite of man-made laws. But how can you tell
+that being alive instead of dead next week or next month may not make an
+eternal difference to some other life? Your part isn't played out yet.
+Who are you to say how much good you may yet do before the curtain is
+rung down?"
+
+"Or how much evil! Well, as a suitable finish, suppose I go down into
+that garden and kill Ely Crouch," he suggested, smiling. "That would be
+a beneficial enough act to entitle me to a prompt and peaceful death,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+"Theoretically sound, but unfortunately impracticable," I answered,
+relieved at his change of tone.
+
+"I suppose it is." He looked at me, still smiling, but intent. "Chris,
+what do you believe comes after?"
+
+"Justice."
+
+"A hard word for cowards. What do I believe, I wonder? At any rate, in
+being sport enough to play the game through. You're right, old
+hard-shell. I'll stick it out. It will only mean spending _this_"--he
+swept the money back into its repository--"a little more slowly."
+
+"I was sure I could count on you," I said. "Now I can give you the
+talisman." I set on the desk before him a small pasteboard box. "Pay
+strict attention. You see that label? That's to remind you. One tablet
+if you can't sleep."
+
+"I couldn't last night."
+
+"Two if the pain becomes more than you can stand."
+
+He nodded.
+
+"But three at one time and you'll sleep so sound that nothing will ever
+awaken you."
+
+"Good old Chris!" Opening the box, he fingered the pellets curiously. "A
+blessed thing, your science! Three and the sure sleep."
+
+"On trust, Ned."
+
+"On honor," he agreed. "Then I mustn't expunge old Crouch? It's a
+disappointment," he added gayly.
+
+He pushed the box away from him and crossed over to the upper window.
+His voice came to me from behind the enshrouding curtains.
+
+"Our friend has finished his promenade. The air is the sweeter for it.
+I'll stay here and breathe it."
+
+"Good!" said I. "I've five minutes of telephoning to do. Then I'll be
+back."
+
+Nobody can ever tell me again that there's an instinct which feels the
+presence of persons unseen. On my way to the door I passed within
+arm's-length of a creature tense and pulsating with the most desperate
+emotions. I could have stretched out a hand and touched her as she
+crouched, hidden in the embrasure of the lower window. It would seem as
+if the whole atmosphere of the room must have been surcharged with the
+terrific passion of her newborn and dreadful hopes. And I felt--nothing.
+No sense, as I brushed by, of the tragic and concentrated force of will
+which nerved and restrained her. I went on, and out unconscious.
+Afterward she was unable to tell me how long she had been there. It must
+have been for some minutes, for what roused her from her stupor of
+terror was the word "Suicide." It was like an echo, a mockery to her, at
+first; and then, as she listened with passionate attention to what
+followed, my instructions about the poison took on the voice of a
+ministering providence. The draperies had shut off the view of Ned, nor
+had she recognized his voice, already altered by the encroachments of
+the disease. But she heard him walk to the upper window, and saw me pass
+on my way to the telephone, and knew that the moment had come. From what
+she told me later, and from that to which I was a mazed witness on my
+return, I piece together the events which so swiftly followed.
+
+A wind had risen outside or Ned might have heard the footsteps sooner.
+As it was, when he stepped out from behind the draperies of the upper
+window those of the lower window were still waving, but the swift figure
+had almost reached the desk. The face was turned from him. Even in that
+moment of astonishment he noticed that she carried her left arm close to
+her body, with a curious awkwardness.
+
+"Hello!" he challenged.
+
+She cried out sharply, and covered the remaining distance with a rush.
+Her hand fell upon the box of pellets. She turned, clutching that little
+box of desperate hopes to her bosom.
+
+"Good God! Virginia!" he exclaimed. "Miss Kingsley!"
+
+"Mr. Worth! Was it you I heard? Why--how are you here?"
+
+"This is my house."
+
+"I didn't know." Keeping her eyes fixed upon him like a watchful animal,
+she slowly backed to interpose the table between herself and a possible
+interference. Her arm, still stiffly pressed to her side, impeded her
+fumbling efforts to open the box. Presently, however, the cover yielded.
+
+He measured the chances of intervention, and abandoned the hope. His
+brain hummed with a thousand conjectures, a thousand questions centering
+upon her obvious and preposterous purpose. Suddenly, as her fingers
+trembled among the tablets, his thoughts steadied and his stratagem
+was formed.
+
+"What do you want with my tonic?" he asked coolly.
+
+"Tonic? I--I thought--"
+
+"You thought it was the poison. Well, you've got the wrong box. The
+poison box is in the drawer."
+
+"In the drawer," she repeated. She spoke in the mechanical voice of one
+desperately intent upon holding the mind to some vital project. Her
+nerveless hands fumbled at the side of the desk.
+
+He crossed quickly, caught up the box which she had just relinquished,
+and dropped it into his pocket.
+
+"Oh!" she moaned, and stared at him with stricken and accusing eyes.
+"Then it _was_ the poison!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Give it back to me!" she implored, like a bereft child. "Oh, give it to
+me!"
+
+"Why do you want to kill yourself?"
+
+She looked at him in dumb despair.
+
+"How did you get here?" he demanded.
+
+"Your fire escape."
+
+"And to that from the garden wall, I suppose? So _you_ were Ely Crouch's
+companion," he cried with a changed voice.
+
+"Don't," she shuddered, throwing her right arm over her face.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said gently. "Take a swallow of this water.
+What's the matter with your arm? Are you hurt?"
+
+"No." Her eyes would not meet his. They were fixed obstinately upon the
+pocket into which he had dropped the poison.
+
+"It's incredible!" he burst out. "You with your youth and loveliness!
+With everything that makes life sweet for yourself and others. What
+madness--" He broke off and his voice softened into persuasion. "We were
+almost friends, once. Can't I--won't you let me help? Don't you think
+you can trust me?"
+
+She raised her eyes to his, and he read in them hopeless terror. "Yes, I
+could trust you. But there is only one help for me now. And you've taken
+it from me."
+
+"Who can tell? You've been badly frightened," he said in as soothing a
+tone as he could command. "Try to believe that no harm can come to you
+here, and that I--I would give the blood of my heart to save you from
+harm or danger. You said you could trust me. What was your errand with
+Ely Crouch?"
+
+"Money."
+
+"Money!" he repeated, drawing back.
+
+"It was our own; my sister's and mine. Mr. Crouch had it. He had managed
+our affairs since my father's death. I could never get an accounting
+from him. To-day the doctor told me that Alice must go away at once for
+an operation. And to-day Mr. Crouch made this appointment for to-night."
+
+"Didn't you know his reputation? Weren't you afraid?"
+
+"I didn't think of fear. When I told him how matters stood, he offered
+me money, but--but--Oh, I can't tell you!"
+
+"No need," he said quickly. "I know what he is. I was joking when I
+spoke of killing him, a little while ago. By God, I wish I had killed
+him! It isn't too late now."
+
+"It _is_ too late."
+
+Her eyes, dilated, were fixed upon his.
+
+"Why? How--too late?" he stammered.
+
+"I killed him."
+
+"_You_! You--killed--Ely--Crouch?"
+
+"He had a cane," she said, in a hurried, flat, half-whisper. "When he
+caught at me, I tried to get it to defend myself. The handle pulled out.
+There was a dagger on it. He came at me again. I didn't realize what I
+was doing. All I could see was that hateful face drawing nearer. Then it
+changed and he seemed to dissolve into a hideous heap. I didn't mean to
+kill him." Her voice rose in the struggle against hysteria. "God knows,
+I didn't mean to kill him."
+
+"Hush!"
+
+His hands fell on her shoulders and held her against the onset. Energy
+and resolution quickened in his eyes. "Who knows of your being in
+the garden?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"Any one see you climb the wall and come here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Or know that you had an appointment with him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Will you do exactly as I tell you?"
+
+"What is the use?" she said dully.
+
+"I'm going to get you out of here."
+
+"I should have to face it later. I couldn't face it--the horror and
+shame of it. I'd rather die a thousand times." She lifted her arms, the
+coat opened, and the cane-handled blade dropped to the floor, and
+rolled. She shuddered away from it. "I kept that for myself, but I
+couldn't do it. It's got his blood on it. When I heard the doctor speak
+of the poison, it seemed like a miracle of Providence sent to guide me.
+Oh, give it to me! Is it"--she faltered--"is it quick?"
+
+"Steady!" Stooping he picked up the weapon. "It needn't come to that, if
+you can play your part. Have you got the courage to walk out of this
+house and go home to safety? Absolute safety!"
+
+She searched his face in bewilderment. "I--don't know."
+
+"If I give you my word of honor that it depends only on yourself?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"Pull yourself together. Go downstairs quietly. Turn to your left.
+You'll see a door. It opens on the street. Walk out with your head up,
+and go home. You're as safe as though you'd never seen Ely Crouch.
+There's no clue to you."
+
+"No clue! Look down the fire escape!"
+
+He crossed the room at a bound. Beneath him, its evil snout pointed
+upwards, sat the dead man's familiar spirit.
+
+"Good God! The ferret!"
+
+"It's been sitting there, watching, watching, watching."
+
+"The more reason for haste. Pull yourself together. Forward, _march_!"
+he cried, pressing his will upon her.
+
+"But you? When they come what will you say to them?"
+
+"I'll fix up something." He drew back from the window, lowering his
+voice. "Men in the garden. A policeman."
+
+"They've found him!" She fell into Ned's chair, dropping her head in her
+hands. For an instant he studied her. Then he took his great and tender
+resolution. His hand fell warm and firm on her shoulder.
+
+"Listen; suppose they suspect some one else?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Me."
+
+"You? Why should they?"
+
+"Circumstances. The place. The weapon here in my possession. My known
+trouble with Ely Crouch. Don't you see how it all fits in?"
+
+She recovered from the stupor of surprise into which his suggestion had
+plunged her. "Are you mad? Do you think that I'd let you sacrifice
+yourself? What am I to you that you should do this for me?"
+
+"The woman I love," he said quietly. "I have loved you from the first
+day that I saw you."
+
+It was at this moment that I returned and halted at the door, an
+unwilling witness to the rest, only half understanding, not daring to
+move. I saw the splendid color mount and glorify her beauty. I saw her
+hands go out to him half in appeal, half in rejection.
+
+"Oh, it's madness!" she cried. "It's your life you're offering me."
+
+"What else should I offer you--you who have given life its real meaning
+for me?"
+
+He caught her hands in his and held them. He caught her eyes in his and
+held them. Then he began speaking, evenly, soothingly, persuasively,
+binding her to his will.
+
+"What does my life amount to? Think how little it means. A few more
+weeks of waiting. Then the suffering: then the release. You heard Dr.
+Smith. You know. You understand. Didn't you understand?"
+
+"Yes," she breathed.
+
+"Then you must see what a splendid way out this is for me. No more
+waiting. No pain. Death never came to any one so kindly before. It's my
+chance, if only you'll make it worth while. Will you?" he pleaded.
+
+"Oh, the wonder of it!" she whispered, gazing on him with parted lips.
+But he did not understand, yet. He pressed what he thought to be his
+advantage.
+
+"Here," he cried, suddenly dropping her hands and catching up the bills
+from the valise. "Here's safety. Here's life. For you and your sister,
+both. You spoke of Providence a moment ago. Here's Providence for you!
+Quick! Take it."
+
+"What is it?" she asked, drawing away as he sought to thrust the money
+into her hands.
+
+"Twenty thousand dollars. More. It doesn't matter. It's life for both of
+you. Have you the right to refuse it? Take it and go."
+
+She let the bank-notes fall from her hands unnoticed.
+
+"Do you think I would leave you _now_?" she cried in a voice of thrilled
+music. "Even if they weren't sure to trace me, as they would be."
+
+This last she uttered as an unimportant matter dismissed with
+indifference.
+
+"There will be nothing to trace. My confession will cover the ground."
+
+"Confession? To what?"
+
+"To the murder of Ely Crouch."
+
+Some sort of sound I was conscious of making. I suppose I gasped. But
+they were too engrossed to hear.
+
+"You would do even that? But the penalty--the shame--"
+
+"What do they matter to a dying man?" he retorted impatiently.
+
+She had fallen back from him, in the shock of his suggestion, but now
+she came forward again slowly, her glorious eyes fixed on his. So they
+stood face to face, soul to soul, deep answering unto deep, and, as I
+sit here speaking, I saw the wonder and the miracle flower in her face.
+When she spoke again, her words seemed the inevitable expression of that
+which had passed silently between them.
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Before God I do," he answered.
+
+"Take me away! There's time yet. I'll go with you anywhere, anywhere!
+I'm all yours. I've loved you from the first, I think, as you have loved
+me. All I ask is to live for you, and when you die, to die with you."
+
+Fire flashed from his face at the call. He took a step toward her. A
+shout, half-muffled, sounded from outside the window. Instantly the
+light and passion died in his eyes. I have never seen a face at once so
+stern and so gentle as his was when he caught the outreaching hands
+in his own.
+
+"You forget that they must find one of us, or it's all no use. Listen
+carefully, dear one. If you truly love me, you must do as I bid you.
+Give me my chance of fooling fate; of making my death worth while. It
+won't be hard." He took the little box from his pocket. "It will be
+very easy."
+
+"Give it to me, too," she pleaded like a child. "Ah, Ned, we can't part
+now! Both of us together."
+
+He shook his head, smiling. The man's face was as beautiful as a god's
+at that moment or an angel's. "You must go back to your sister," he said
+simply. "You haven't the right to die."
+
+He turned to the table, drew a sheet of paper to him and wrote four
+words. You all know what they were; his confession. Then his hand went
+up, a swift movement, and a moment later he was setting back the glass
+of water upon the desk whence he had taken it.
+
+"Love and glory of my life, will you go?" he said.
+
+"Yes," she whispered.
+
+Not until then did the paralysis, which had gripped me when I saw Ned
+turn the pellets into his hand, relax. I ran forward. The girl cried
+out. Ned met me with his hand against my breast.
+
+"How much have you heard?" he said quickly.
+
+"Enough."
+
+"Then you'll understand." His faith was more irresistible than a
+thousand arguments. "Take her home, Chris."
+
+I held out my hand. "Come," I said.
+
+She turned and faced him. "Must I? Alone?" What a depth of desolation in
+that word!
+
+"There is no other way, dearest one."
+
+"Good-bye, then, until we meet," she said in the passionate music of her
+voice. "Every beat of my heart will bring me nearer to you. There will
+be no other life for me. Soon or late I'll come to you. You believe it.
+Say you believe it!"
+
+"I believe it." He bent and kissed her lips. Then his form slackened
+away from the arms that clasped it, and sank into the chair. A
+policeman's whistle shrilled outside the window. The faintest flicker of
+a smile passed over the face of the sleeper.
+
+I took her away, still with that unearthly ecstasy on her face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The glow of the narrator's cigar waxed, a pin-point of light in a world
+of dimness and mystery. Subdued breathing made our silence rhythmic.
+When I found my voice, it was hardly more than a whisper.
+
+"Good God! What a tragedy!"
+
+"Tragedy? You think it so?" The Little Red Doctor's gnarled face gleamed
+strangely behind the tiny radiance. "Dominie, you have a queer notion of
+this life and little faith in the next."
+
+"'She met death as a tryst,'" murmured the old librarian. "And he!
+'Trailing clouds of glory!' The triumph of that victory over fate! One
+would like to have seen the meeting between them, after the waiting."
+
+The Little Red Doctor rose. "When some brutal and needless tragedy of
+the sort that we medical men witness so often shakes my faith in my
+kind, I turn to think of those two in the splendor of their last meeting
+on earth, the man with the courage to face death, the woman with the
+courage to face life."
+
+He strode over to the table and lifted the newspaper, which had slipped
+to the floor unnoticed. The girlish face turned toward us its
+irresistible appeal, yearning out from amidst the lurid indignities
+of print.
+
+"You heard from her afterward?" I asked.
+
+"Often. The sister died and left her nothing to live for but her
+promise. Always in her letters sounded the note of courage and of
+waiting. It was in the last word I had from her--received since her
+death--set to the song of some poet, I don't know who. You ought to
+know, Mr. Sheldon."
+
+His deep voice rose to the rhythm.
+
+  "Ah, long-delayed to-morrow! Hearts that beat
+  Measure the length of every moment gone.
+  Ever the suns rise tardily or fleet
+  And light the letters on a churchyard stone.--
+  And still I say, 'To-morrow we shall meet!'"
+
+"May Probyn," the librarian identified. "Too few people know her. A
+wonderful poem!"
+
+Silence fell again, folding us and our thoughts in its kindly refuge.
+Rising, I crossed to the window and drew the curtain aside. A surging
+wind had swept the sky clear, all but one bank of low-lurking, western
+cloud shot through with naming crimson. In that luminous setting the
+ancient house across Our Square, grim and bleak no longer to my eyes,
+gleamed, through eyes again come to life, with an inconceivable glory.
+Behind me in the shadow, the measured voice of the witness to life and
+death repeated once more the message of imperishable hope:
+
+  "And still I say, 'To-morrow we shall meet.'"
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's From a Bench in Our Square, by Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10944 ***