CHAPTER XIITHE NEW MEMBER

"For to-morrow will be Friday, andWe've caught no fish to-day!"

To the left, Brother Hilarius furtively ignored his breviary as he passed a gayaffiche, from which a silken-limbeddancer beguiled him with nimble, worldly caperings, and smiles of the flesh and the devil.

"There's a vacant panel or two in the other room," said Piersoll. "We'll save one for you. Come down to the grill room—it's early yet."

They went out through the hall and down a narrow stairway. They heard the lively hum of voices, and Ewing found himself in a low, wainscoted room, finished in dull gray, where a dozen or so men talked loungingly in corners, awaiting the dinner hour.

Piersoll presented him to several of these in so quick a succession that their names became a many-syllabled murmur in his ears. They found seats on a red-cushioned corner bench of churchly pattern, and Piersoll ordered cocktails.

Ewing tried to follow the talk running about him. A boyish-looking reporter for a morning paper was telling at a nearby table how he had been the first to reach the scene of a railroad wreck in Pennsylvania late the night before by fording a swollen river. At another table a successful playwright obligingly expounded the laws of dramatic construction to a respectful novice, who seemed puzzled by their simplicity. At their own table a youth of yellow melancholy confided to Piersoll that the afternoon had witnessed an important transaction in verse—the sale of his ballade, "She Was a Belle in the Days of Daguerre." "The editor of 'Quips' took it and paid on acceptance—let's have another," he added with deep significance.

The atmosphere of the place was unthinkingly democratic. The cub reporter here met his city editor as man to man. Piersoll identified various members of the gathering—the dramatic critic of an evening paper in busytalk with the Wall Street man of the same sheet; a promising young composer cornered by the star reporter of a morning paper, a grizzled knight of the world of war, crime, flood, fire, and all mischance of any news value, a man who had attained the dignity of signing his "stuff." Old men and young, they were compacted of nerves, vividly alive, even those in whom the desk stoop could be detected.

The movable feast of the cocktail waned and the groups drifted upstairs. The publisher for whom Piersoll waited came at last, a bland but keen-eyed gentleman of early middle age, introduced to Ewing as Mr. Layton, of Layton & Company. They followed the others up to the dining room, and Piersoll found a table for three under the drawing of the earnest but miscalculating angler.

Ewing nervously apprehended talk of an abstruse literary character from which he would be debarred. The talk assuredly became abstruse, but it dealt in literary values solely as related to public taste in the novel of commerce, and to the devices of Layton & Company for divining and stimulating that variable quantity.

Instead of descanting on Shakespeare, as Ewing had supposed a publisher would do, Layton, with the soup, plunged into a racy narrative of how he had "boomed" sales of "The Mask of Malcolm" the year before. That had been a success compounded of trifles. Witness Layton's chance view from a car window of a "Mask of Malcolm" poster on a watering cart that toiled through the dusty main street of a remote Western village. He had written to the postmaster of that town for the name of the cart's driver, sent him a copy of the novelinscribed by the author, and enough more posters to cover his cart. Result: a sale in the aroused village and surrounding country of two hundred and eighty "Masks," where otherwise not more than half a dozen would have been sold. Further result: the watering carts of the great mid-West were now cunningly blazoned with incitements to purchase Layton & Company's fiction.

Ewing still feared Shakespeare or Chaucer, or George Eliot, at the least; but the publisher clung to earth, launching into his plans for Piersoll's next book. "The Promotion of Fools" was in its hundredth thousand. The next book must go beyond this.

"You want a smashing good love scene at the end," urged the sapient Layton, "and plenty of good, plain, honest heart feeling all through it. Make a quaintly humorous character, simple-minded, trusting, but still shrewd, and win the reader's sympathy for him by giving him some sort of hard luck—a crippled child that dies isn't bad, if the father has been harsh to him some time, not meaning to be, you know. And not too much dialect; enough to contrast well with the Fifth Avenue people. Then, with the kind of hero you know how to draw—swell family, handsome, refined, a real gentleman, and all that sort of thing, with an English valet—you'll have a story that willgo. You can write a winner, Piersoll, if you'll listen to your publisher. We keep our fingers on the public pulse; we know the taste better than you can know it, shut up in your office. And have a good, catchy dedication—people are interested in your personality. Couldn't you have in the next book something like 'To my Mother in Heaven, whose Memory——'"

"Our people are all Unitarians," suggested Piersoll.

"What difference doesthatmake——"

"And my mother has been graciously spared to us——"

"Well, then, 'To my Gray-haired Mother, whose Loving Counsel has ever—'youknow the sort of thing, short and snappy, but full of feeling. It helps, let me tell you, with the people who pick up a book on the stands."

Ewing lost the run of this talk for a time, entertaining himself with a study of the other diners. The rooms had rapidly filled, and two waiters scurried among the tables. His attention focused on a long table in the center of the room, whose occupants made savage and audible comment on diners at other tables, and confided to one another, in loud, free tones, their frank impressions of late comers.

The door opened upon a goodly youth in evening dress. Seven pairs of eyes from the big table fixed him coldly as he removed his overcoat.

A voice, affectedly mincing: "As I live—handsome Harold Armytage!"

Another voice, hoarse with rage: "Curse ye, devil that ye are, with yer oily tongue and city ways! where's me daughter Letty, me little lass, that ye took up to the big city and threatened to make a lady of?"

A voice, hushed and slow: "They—say—the—child—is—in—London."

The newcomer, flicking the ash from his cigarette, glowered at the last speaker and hissed: "As for you, Black Bart, alias Jasper Vinton, remember that one word from me would set all Scotland Yard on your trail!"

A new voice from the table: "Stand back, HectorWalsingham! I would rather be the poor working girl I am than the gilded toy your wealth would make me—and besides, you wear made ties! I'll have to speak to the stage manager about that," continued the speaker in less dramatic tones. "Look, it's one of those horrible made things that fasten at the back of his neck with a harness buckle—see his hand go up to it!"

The newcomer emitted a mocking laugh, but judiciously sought a seat in the next room.

"Say—new idea for a melodrama," came another voice from the long table. "The old thing with an Ibsen twist. Stern father ready to drive erring daughter from his door in a snowstorm, butit won't snow! Of course he can't send her off in pleasant weather. It clouds up every few days, and the old man hopefully gets his speech ready—'Curse ye, ye are no longer a daughter of mine!' but the sun comes out again. Girl gets nervous. Young squire gets nervous, too, though he's married the girl in secret. He begs the old man to put her out and have it over with, even if the weather is pleasant. Old man won't hear of such a thing. Got to have a howling snowstorm. His mind fails; he sits in the chimney corner driveling about the horrible winters they used to have when you could curse a daughter out almost any day in the week. Everybody disgusted at the way things are dragging. Young people quarrel. Divorce! Young squire sails for Labrador to try it again, where you can count on the winters. Girl watches ship out of sight, andit snows! Snows hard. But too late—ah, God, too late! She rushes back home to find the old man delirious with joy. He starts in to do his speech at last, but she slowly strangles him with her muscular young hands. Rather good curtain,that—yes?" He looked around the table appealingly, but the others had turned from him to another newcomer, a young man of dark and sinister aspect, whom they greeted as Simon Legree. Ewing heard Eliza's despairing cry, "Merciful Heavens, the river is choked with ice!" above the deep baying of bloodhounds that issued from half a dozen able throats. The newcomer was obliging enough to scowl and demand fiercely, "Tom, you black rascal, ain't you mine, body and soul?"

A fair-haired youth at the table, with the face of an overfed Cupid, responded pleadingly: "No—no, Massa! Mah body may b'long to yo' but mah soul to de good Lawd who made it!"

"Crack! Crack! Crack! Take that, you black hound, and that, and that!" Uncle Tom cringed under the blows of an imaginary lash, and Legree seated himself at the long table. A bearded man at the head promptly became little Eva, with a piping voice. "Uncle Tom, dear Uncle Tom, I fear I am going to die in the last act."

The faithful slave gulped at his claret and water and replied tearfully, "Dar, dar, Miss Eba, yo' bre'k dis pore ole man's heart!"

"And, dear Uncle Tom, remember that the colored quartet will slink in and sing 'Rock of Ages' while I am dying on a camp bed in the parlor. Think of that, you black hound!"

"Indeed, that is what I am apprehending, Miss St. Clair," returned Uncle Tom, this time in polished accents and with marked urbanity. "And you are doubtless aware that I shall have to be present and listen to it. Come, then, little one! If you must die, come with me into the back yard where the quartet can't find us, andI will feed you to the nice hungry bloodhounds. They've had nothing since tea."

Ewing listened, aghast. He had once gone with Ben in Durango to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and both of them had wept at its heartrending crisis. It embarrassed him now to hear its pathos blasphemed, embarrassed him because he felt a sort of shamed mirth. He was glad that Ben was not by.

Piersoll and his publisher still discussed literature. Layton was now setting forth the superior state of the latter-day author over those of the past.

"Those old fellows had no market—publishers were a sleepy lot. Think what could have been done with 'Paradise Lost,' illustrated by Hulston with about fifty half tones and marginal decorations, and an elegant binding, properly advertised with testimonials from clergymen and leading actresses and senators and prominent college presidents. I tell you, gentlemen," he concluded, earnestly, "this is the golden age of letters!"

This phrase unhappily reaching the big table in a moment of quiet, made an instant sensation.

"The golden age of letters!" was echoed in concert by eight men who arose solemnly and bowed to the embarrassed Layton. He tried to smile tolerantly, as if he knew a joke when he saw one. They sat down and turned to stare at him with extravagant awe, catching his eye when they could and drinking to the golden age. Piersoll grinned cheerfully at them. Ewing was puzzled.

"I like this place for its literary atmosphere," said one loudly, gazing over the head of Layton. "Don't you all just love literature?" "Oh, I simply adore it!" answered the next man. "I really can't say what Ishould do without books. I think they improve the mind."

Now they hitched their chairs about so that they could regard Layton more easily, though they affected to be unconscious of his presence.

"Itdoesseem to me that literature is good to read," ventured another conservatively, "but then,Ilove music and flowers and the little birds."

"I should die without literature," insisted another—"it's so good and excellent. Oh, why do not more people read literature and be decent!"

"Now you take Henry James," began another, judicially, "he's a bright writer, but he can't touch the great throbbing heart of the public like Hall Caine can."

"Whatisa Hall Caine can?" demanded the whiskered person bluntly. "I thought they kept 'em in jars."

Layton rose, genially bidding his host and Ewing good night. The men at the long table rose with him, bowed ceremoniously, and chanted "the golden age of letters" as he passed—all but one, who sobbed bitterly because poor Shakespeare had not lived to see it.

Ewing was still dazed, but he had slowly been growing cheerful. He felt that he could almost understand this strange fooling. He would have been glad to observe it still from a distance, but Piersoll took him to the long table when Layton had gone. The others made room for them, and Ewing responded somewhat timidly to the introductions that Piersoll performed. He was a little anxious lest he be made a part or target of their sport and show himself awkward under the ordeal. For the moment, however, there were remarks about the undesirability of "tradesmen" as guests of the club.

"I know a lovely delicatessen merchant," said onebrightly, "a most interesting person. He says this is the golden age of cooked provisions. I must have him round the next time Layton is brought in."

"I can get a plumber from over on Eighth Avenue," volunteered another. "We might have a 'trade' night, if Layton will come. Of course they'll talk about nothing but how to sell their wares, but they'll have a good time together."

Presently they forsook this theme, and Ewing found himself talking to Chalmers, an illustrator with whose work he had long been familiar. Though Chalmers drew Western subjects, Ewing was amazed at his confession that he had never been west of Jersey City. Chalmers, on the other hand, was delighted to learn that Ewing had so long been a part of that life which he had portrayed from afar, and was at once profuse with offers of help when Ewing explained his situation. He was eager to see his work, and would install him in a studio.

"I know the place for you," he exclaimed, after a moment's reflection. "There's a vacant studio in our building on Forty-second Street. Billy Glynn told me to sublet it and sell the stuff the first chance I had. You can move in right off if you like it."

Ewing thanked him warmly. It was pleasant to find that the recent Simon Legree had his human side. Two of the other men at the table had studios in the same building: Crandall, who made pictures for a comic weekly, and Baldwin, who was a magazine illustrator. They became, like Chalmers, solicitous to oblige the newcomer, and were attentive to Piersoll when he praised, with a quick word or two, the drawings of Ewing. He felt immensely drawn to these men who had dropped their bantering to be kind to him.

The crowd of diners had thinned out until only a few lingered over their coffee. From one or another of these scattered groups would come a burst of laughter at the climax of a story, or a bar of song from one who had reached his playtime of the day, and recked not if he advertised this. It was an hour of ease in the Monastery, when its inmates expanded in the knowledge that Sunday lay before them. To some, at least, this could be a day of rest.

A musical member came from the rear room to the piano near the long table to play a Liszt rhapsody. When this performer had gone back to his seat one of the men from the big table—he who had lately enacted Little Eva, and whose title of "The Brushwood Boy" Ewing at once related to his beard—seated himself at the instrument.

"Heard a great song over on Third Avenue last night," he began. "Wish I could remember—something like this—" His fingers searched for the melody. Ewing caught a transient strain of it and thrilled to recognize Ben's favorite, a thing he might be singing to his guitar in the far-off lonely cabin at that very moment.

"'The Fatal Wedding,'" he ventured to the performer.

"Sure—that's it! 'The Fatal Wedding.' Wish you fellows could have heard it—rich! How did it go, now?"

Ewing recklessly hummed the opening bars.

"Go ahead, if you know it!" This came from several of the men. He protested. He would have liked to sing it, yet feared to do so before an audience whose ridicule he had learned to dread. He considered the song to be irreproachable and could understandthe apparent enthusiasm about it, but he doubted his worth as a vocalist.

"I don't believe I'd better try it," he began; "I know the words—it's the favorite song of an old-time cowboy I've lived with, and he does it right. I couldn't give anything more than a poor imitation of him."

The inciting calls were renewed.

"Go on! Do your worst! Show us how your friend does it! Silence in the back of the hall!"

Piersoll smiled encouragingly and the accompanist struck the opening chords, having at last recalled the air. Ewing diffidently took his place at the end of the piano, with apologetic protests. "I'll do my best, but you should hear Ben Crider sing this."

The little audience listened with unfeigned delight as he sang of the handsome stranger who wooed the village beauty, only to desert her for "a lady proud and haughty" who had "houses, jewels, land, and gold at her command." The words moved his hearers. Had he not promised them to render the song in his friend's manner? They felt he was achieving this with rare art. Almost unconsciously, indeed, he sang the song in Ben's best manner, with a sob in the voice and even with Ben's strained, sad face as he reached the pitiful climax:

"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."

He moved quickly back to his chair almost before the first shouts of laughter dismayed him. He blushed and glanced appealingly from face to face as the applause was swelled by the groups in the rear room. He and Ben had considered this no song to be laughed at. It was too sad. Yet he saw that the applause was afriendly tribute to his performance. Piersoll was pounding him joyously between the shoulders and Chalmers was urging him to do Ben Crider singing the "Fatal Wedding" at their next club smoker. Baldwin demanded the last verse again, and Ewing sang it, from his chair this time, redoubling his efforts to bring out its pathos.

In the new applause that deafened him he felt reassured. At least they were not laughing athim. He joined weakly in the merriment. The gods had blessed him with a gift for silence at critical moments. He asked no questions.

As the mirth subsided voices were heard unctuously rehearsing choice lines from the song. A passion for the ballad pathetic had been aroused. Some one called on Chalmers.

"Chalmers has written a song himself—give it to us, Chalmers—the one you sang up at Needham's the other night." Chalmers took his place and bowed low as the accompanist poised eager hands above the key-board.

"Gentlemen, with your kind attention, I'll give you a little thing called 'Nothing but Mother'—words and music by a party that doesn't want his real name known because the folks back home might hear of it. Let her go, Professor!"

In a twangy, nasal voice, not unlike Ben's, enunciating his words with the fastidious and strained precision of the music-hall balladist, he began:

"The courtroom, it was crowded,All the witnesses was there;The Judge he sat a-frowningIn his highly cushioned chair.They was trying a old ladyFor the stealing of a horse;They had hauled her to the station,Theyhad dragged her there by force!"

The last line had been achieved with intense, passionate emphasis. Ewing, listening intently, felt the pricking of a nameless suspicion. The song seemed right enough, and yet some queer, ulterior emotion stirred within him. The air continued in a stirring minor, adapted to the dramatic action:

"Then uprose a handsome lawyer,But would not give his name;He defended this old ladyAnd well he done the same.The verdict was "Not guilty!"Tearsstood in the jury's eyes;When the unknown lawyer heard it,Then says he to their surprise:"

With secret consternation Ewing waited, trying to laugh with the others, who had exploded at "tears," wrenched out in a high minor wail. The air now took a graceful swinging waltz movement, and the puzzled youth suffered an illumining flash:

"She was my mother onceIn days of long ago;I'll not forsake her now,Her lots has fell so low.I have other mothers nowTo take me by the hand,But I'll not desert this oneJust because I'm rich and grand."

Enlightened at last, Ewing joined in the applause, amid which Chalmers resumed his seat. Instantly perceiving why they had laughed at his own song, heburned at recalling how chance alone had saved him from betraying a simple-hearted faith in the virtues of that gem. Now it was funny, even to him. Other songs of Ben's rang in his ears; they wereallfunny—though he must never let Ben know that. He had unwittingly betrayed Ben to a ribald crew, but he had learned a thing it was well to know. He had learned of the world; he had aged in a leap.

They sat late at table, drinking beer from stone mugs, smoking long-stemmed pipes and trifling with song. They blended their voices in melting harmony at the climax of "Nelly's" woe and in the acuter parts of "Nothing but Mother."

As they drifted out at midnight Chalmers made an appointment with Ewing to inspect the vacant studio and make himself, if he liked, one of the colony of not too serious workers housed by the Rookery.

Half a dozen men strolled with him to the Stuyvesant, and in the shadow of its sober doors, as a parting testimonial to his worth, they sang once more in blended pathos:

"She was my moth-e-r-r onceIn days so long a-g-o-o-o!"

He watched them up the street a block, pouring out their hearts in song to a watchful and cynical policeman.

WHEN Ewing, a few days later, moved into the vacant studio on the top floor of the Rookery, the men there made an affair of it, flocking from their studios to receive him. They showed him the view from his windows, a far stretch of dull-red roofs, with murky water butts stuck aloft like giant cockades against the gray sky. They showed him where he would sleep, in a little closet-like alcove screened from the big room by a gay curtain. They exhibited the alcohol lamp left by Glynn, over which water would be boiled for the morning coffee. And they superintended, from their wider experience, the arrangement of his belongings.

He felt aloof from the friendly turmoil, unable to believe that the place would be his own. The thing was too vast for his experience. It would surely be for another that Baldwin spread the Navajo blankets on the floor and couch; for some one else that Chalmers, of the beard—him they called the Brushwood Boy or eke "the human ambush"—removed piles of old magazines from the cot in the alcove; for some one else that Dallas tucked brushes into a ginger jar; and for some one else that Griggs tested water taps and the radiator.

When they had cheerfully discovered that no one could think of anything further to do they trooped down Broadway to celebrate Ewing's advent in a dinnerat the Monastery. When this was over and the crowd had thinned to a few late sitters they had him do a picture. The others watched him as he worked, standing on a bare table drawn to the wall. Brother Hilarius grew before their eyes, insecurely astride a bucking broncho, narrowly observed by two figures in the background—a dismayed brother of his order in gown of frieze and hempen girdle, and Red Phinney, contorting himself in ribald glee.

The watchers applauded as the picture grew. They had not supposed that the quiet, almost timid, boy, who betrayed his unsophistication by countless little mannerisms, could have attained the sureness of line his strokes revealed.

The heated air of the room rushed up to make a torrid zone of the region about the worker's head, and from time to time one of the watchers handed him a mug of creaming ale with which he washed the dust of the charcoal from his throat. He lost himself in the work at last. The voices, laughter, songs, strains of the piano, came but faintly to him, and were as the echoes of street life that sounded in his ears each night before he slept. It was after one o'clock when he stepped down from the table to survey the finished drawing.

He knew he had done well, but he was glad to be told so by others. It was clearly their opinion that the club had in no way descended from its high standards of mural decoration. Baldwin brought a bottle of fixative and sprayed the drawing through a blowpipe. Then they drained a final bumper to the artist and the work and went out into the mild September night, making the empty street, sleeping in shadow, resound to their noisy talk.

The light of a car crept ghostlike toward them and they stood to board it. As it moved on through Broadway Ewing thought of an empty creek bed at the bottom of some ravine at home. This was the dry time, but with earliest dawn would come the freshet, flooding the cañon, surging over its rocky bed to some outlet as mysterious as its source. The image brought him a sudden pang of homesickness. Despite the jovial friendliness of the crowd he was still a detached spectator. There was no intimacy for him, no real contact. He was glad to remember the bed that awaited him and confessed this to Chalmers.

"Bed!" echoed Chalmers in righteous amazement. "What's the use of going to bed? You only fall asleep!"

"He's right, old man," put in Baldwin warningly. "I've tried it."

Dallas turned a reproachful gaze on Ewing. "God has given you a beautiful life and you sleep it away! Come, come, man!"

"We'll have a bite to eat, anyway," broke in Griggs. "Come on, here's Clayton's."

They were presently about a table far back in a restaurant where lingered many sitters-up of nights. They ordered Welsh rabbits and ale. Ewing refused the ale and drank water.

Dallas put on an air of wishing to defend this choice of beverage. "Of course, it's the stuff that made Noah famous," he submitted.

"Yes—and it made all that trouble at Johnstown, too," broke in Chalmers with deep hostility in his look at Ewing's glass. "I can't forget that. Water has never been the same to me since."

They fell to the food when it came. They smoked,they drank more ale, they sang in tones enough subdued to avert public disfavor, and they flung jests about to spice the endless gossip of their craft.

Ewing listened, yet with eager eyes for the people at other tables about them. These men and women captivated him by their suggestions of mystery—characters in the play he was forever beholding—curious-looking men whose faces suggested lives of dramatic tension; beautiful women, splendidly arrayed, with much of mystery and something of daring in their animation. He scanned them all furtively as the talk at his own table flowed on.

It was chiefly of their work that they talked. Chalmers related matters exposing the inefficiency of an art editor to whose mercies fate now and then betrayed him. Chalmers bitterly thought that this person should be driving an ice wagon or helping about in a shipyard, or something of the sort—not telling artists how to draw their pictures.

Baldwin sympathized. He had his own art editor. It came out that no man present had ever even heard of a competent art editor. It stood to reason that there could be none. A man of capacity to be an art editor would have too much self-respect. He would starve in the gutter first. But it took time and talk and replenished mugs to reduce this truth to its beautiful, naked simplicity, and Ewing at last saw that day had come. The lights inside were paling to an unwholesome yellow. He mentioned the circumstance insinuatingly, for he was tired.

Baldwin scowled at his watch, then dropped it into his fresh mug of ale, and glanced triumphantly about the table.

"A degenerate race," muttered Chalmers. "At the first sign of daylight we scamper off to bed like scared rabbits. For me—thank God—there's nothing like the glorious sunrise, the crisp air, the healthy glow. There's magic in it—Nature's choicest gift. Yes, sir, the splendors of dawn for me! D'you s'pose I'd missthis?" He glared about the room and ecstatically sniffed the thick, smoky air. "What does that clod know of beauty?" He indicated a waiter, dozing against the wall with practiced equilibrium.

"Well, well," exclaimed Baldwin, "if I haven't gone and forgotten to eat breakfast! How shiftless!" He aroused the waiter with snapping fingers. "I hope we're not keeping you up, Claude, but bacon and eggs, please, and coffee."

An hour later they went out to find the street already alive with early workers. Baldwin appeared to consider that these, also, were night-long revelers.

"'Stonishing how they can keep it up, night after night," he remarked, frowning in wonder at the early procession. "You'd think they'dhaveto sleep some time."

"It'll tell on their nerves sooner or later, you mark my words," said Griggs sententiously.

Chalmers stared intently into the window of a florist adjoining the restaurant. He turned to them with purpose in his fair face and spoke again of his art editor.

"Only trouble with him—he's passed away, poor fellow, and doesn't know it. He ought to be told—but not brutally. I see something here for him."

He came out of the florist's presently with a sizable emblem of mortality—a floral pillow with "Rest" worked on it in immortelles.

"Come on!"

At the corner they crowded into hansoms. It was a long ride, and Ewing was asleep when they reached Park Row, but they aroused him to help escort Chalmers and his offering to the elevator of a mighty building. While they awaited his return Baldwin bethought him of his own art editor. He seemed to believe that something fitting might be done. After deep reflection he crossed the narrow street to a district messenger office, to emerge a moment later followed by eight grinning messenger boys. These he led to the elevator of another building near by.

Chalmers returned from his own mission, wiping his eyes.

"Poor fellow, he knows he's dead now. But I broke down and sobbed like a child when I gave it to him—I'm all heart. It's over now, all but the life insurance. And yet he didn't thank me. On the contrary he spoke language I should blush to repeat."

The others put on looks of chastened gloom and were speaking in hushed tones of the sad event when Baldwin returned. He dismissed his uniformed attendants with largesse.

"Thing that needed to be done for his own good," he explained. "Max believes he's an art editor, but nobody else does—nobody else ever believed it in this whole wide, beautiful world. So I lined those trusting little boys up in front of his door and said, 'Boys, look in there and you will see a real art editor.' They looked in at old Max and then at me. 'You believe it, don't you, boys?' I asked them, and they all said, 'Yes, sir!' So I made them bow to him and say in concert, 'Wedobelieve you are an art editor, no matter what otherpeople say,' and then we left. We had to. I'm ashamed to tell you—but old Max seemed to forget that he was a gentleman. He'll thank me when he comes to his senses, all the same. He can lay his head on his pillow to-night knowing that there are others in the world besides himself who believe he's an art editor. Oh, I love to do good!" he concluded with a benevolent smirk.

Once more they were in the hansoms and Ewing slept again, to the strains of "I have other mothers now," sung by Baldwin, who sat in his lap.

As they climbed the stairs of the Rookery Baldwin found the moment suited for sage counsel to Chalmers.

"'T won't do, my boy—'t won't do! Can't burn candles both ends. Your face this minute looks like one of those cheap apple pies in a restaurant window."

Ewing mounted to his own floor and found himself in the curious stillness of the big room. It had seemed to wait there for him, mutely, but with desire. He stood a moment in the silence, his ears ringing with after sounds of the night. He fell on the couch, too tired to go formally to bed, and felt himself falling into sleep as into a beneficent and welcoming abyss.

HE awoke from a dream noisy with laughter and the ring of shod hoofs on a stone roadway; a phantasma in which faces were gray and distorted through smoke and people did wild things in sane ways. He lay long enough to separate the fiction of this dream from the actual but not more credible performances of the night before. Then he rose, yawning away the last of his drowsiness, and looked out over the roofs. He saw that it was late afternoon, for the shadows of the water butts ran well to the east. The mute solitude of the scene gave his loneliness a new pang. He felt more solitary in the multitude than he had ever felt in his unpeopled hills. Yet the place still lured him, not less than in days when he had hungered for it, a starved lover of life in the desert. If only he could find some one to come near, some one to whom he could be his unguarded self. Such a one must exist.

His eyes swept the reticent roofs, and his mind searched beneath them: what felicitous possibilities did they not conceal? People doubtless fasting like himself, longing for the friendly cry, eating their hearts out in loneliness—men and women he might know or never know. He lifted each roof as he gazed; under any one of them might be the companion; under all were charms of adventurous search.

In this moment of homesick longing his mind caughtat Mrs. Laithe. She had told him to come soon. Did that mean in one day, or in ten? She was his one link with an old life that had filled if it did not satisfy. And sometimes she had met him. Chiefly she had been a woman for the eyes, but there had been fleeting times when they touched in ways that brought him a deeper satisfaction—times when invisible antennæ from each seemed to be in communicative contact. These moments brought back the palsy of shyness that had stricken him at his first glimpses of her; yet they brought, too, some potent, strange essence that sustained him. He resolved to go to her now. She mystified, she dismayed him, but her kindness was dependable.

It was the memory of this that moved him to throw off his stale, smoke-saturated garments, to bathe, to dress himself afresh, and to walk briskly through the tonic sharpness of a September afternoon.

As he rang the bell a vague, delightful home-coming warmth rushed over him.

"In a moment I shall see her," he said within himself. As the door swung back he heard the din of many voices and caught a rush of heated air, sweetish with the odor, as it seemed, of tired and fainting flowers. At the entrance to the drawing room he faltered, for the place was thronged with terrifying strange people who held teacups and talked explosively.

Longing to flee, he saw Mrs. Laithe across the room, turning somewhat wearily, he thought, away from three or four voluble women, as if to snatch at a moment of rest from her perfunctory smile. Almost instantly her eyes swung to his, and he became aware, as she started toward him, of some sudden flurry leaping behind theirblack-fringed curtains, a quick play of lights that stirred and confused him. She gave him her hand with half-formal phrases of greeting under which he detected a rising nervousness.

"So good of you to come, and on my day! They're tiresome at best. You are well? You shall have tea and know some people." She went to a table between the two rooms, where a girl in white drew tea from a samovar into many little cups. Ewing began to watch this girl, a slight but rounded creature with yellowish hair curving down either side of her tanned face. He caught a greenish light in her eyes, as she bent to her task with a somewhat anxious concentration.

Mrs. Laithe brought him the tea, which he helplessly took, and presented him to a vivid-hued young matron, who made room for him beside her. His part in the talk that followed was confined to mutterings of agreement, tinged now and then with a discreet sympathy. He heard the latest golf andyachtingnews and sprightly chat of the lady's newest motor car. He caught a blurred view of the Austrian Tyrol, and absorbed technical data on the operation of smuggling silk stockings from Paris. He gleaned that Airedales were difficult to raise; that Caruso would return; that all coachmen were but hirelings of the sales stables, when you got at the root of the trouble. He learned that Newport had been deadly, Bar Harbor impossible, Tuxedo not half bad for a week end; and that New York would be empty for another fortnight.

Upon none of these difficult matters had he anything of moment to offer. The assertion that New York was empty bereft him, indeed, of even his slender power of assent. The lady would have considered him stupid butfor the look with which he met her quick eyes from time to time. She decided that he was merely bored—a thing not to be particularly remarked. It was common enough in the men she met.

In one of the roving looks he permitted himself under his companion's discourse his glance rested on two people far back in the library. One was Mrs. Laithe's father. He stood, cup in hand, talking down to a smartly attired, whitehaired woman who sat forward in her chair and stared at Ewing. Her gown was black, and one white-gloved hand rested on Bartell's arm. Her eyes did not waver as Ewing met them. He saw that Bartell seemed to identify him in the throng and speak a few words to the lady. Ewing turned to his companion, discomfort under that steady survey. A moment later he was drawn to look again and saw Bartell coming toward him.

"Ah, young man!" His greeting oozed cordiality, the soothing friendliness of a man fitted to find only the pleasantness of life.

"And come with me, if Mrs. Dudley will let you off—" the lady smiled a pretty but unreserved assent—"an old friend, Mrs. Lowndes, wants to know you. She's a dear soul, always jolly. Tell her about cowboys and things, won't you—something pleasant."

They stood before the woman in the chair, and Bartell uttered a few words which Ewing did not hear, for at the moment he had glanced up to see Mrs. Laithe watching him with eyes of such genuine dismay that confusion overtook him. He wondered what wrong thing he could have done, but recovered in time to bow and murmur a phrase of acknowledgment. His new acquaintance indicated a seat beside her, but did not look at him.

"Thank you, Chris. Mr. Ewing will entertain me. Run off to someone as young as yourself."

Bartell smiled himself back into the more crowded room, and Ewing waited, apprehending talk like that he had lately undergone. But he found that this woman who had stared at him so curiously was not voluble. For a long time she remained silent. Once he glanced up to observe that her eyes were closed, and seized the moment to study her face. He thought she was very old—sixty at least. Yet the face showed strength in its frailness. The cheeks, looking brown under the plenteous white hair, were lined but not withered, and the curve from brow to chin revealed more than a suggestion of self-will. A dainty but imperious old lady he thought her. He might have believed himself forgotten but for an intimation of waiting thrown out by her manner, a suggestion of leaning toward him, breathless, one of the gloved hands poising as if to alight on his arm. He found this less tiring than the compulsion he had lately been under to agree with a livelier woman about matters strange to him. And yet he was relieved when she opened her eyes as if to speak. He regarded her with puzzled but kind expectancy. At last she said, and he understood that her voice was unnaturally tight and hard:

"Mr. Bartell tells me that you are a painter, Mr. Ewing."

"I'm trying to be—they are very kind here."

"Your father was Gilbert Ewing—a painter?"

"Oh, youknewhim?" He thrilled at the thought, but was disappointed.

"Mr. Bartell mentioned his name—and yours."

"He was a painter, yes; he died out there in Colorado."

She seemed to shudder ever so slightly and her eyes closed again.

"And your—your mother?" The words were hardly more than a whisper.

"My mother died when I was very small."

Again she seemed to wince under a sting. But now she fell away from that waiting tenseness with which she had held him. The hand that had hovered over his arm fell limply into her lap, and she leaned back in her chair.

"I'm afraid you aren't very well," he ventured. "The rooms are close."

She opened her eyes, with no sign of having heard. Sitting forward in her chair she gazed ahead with narrowed eyes.

"I am an old woman and dull, Mr. Ewing, but I should like to have you come and see me."

"I'll be glad to come," he answered promptly enough, though he could not keep surprise from his voice.

"Come to-morrow, if you will, and pardon an old woman's whim in asking you with so little ceremony."

"I will come, of course." He wondered if she felt a city loneliness like his own.

"Thank you. I shall be in after four." She gave him a card from a small silver case at her belt. "The roomisclose. You may fetch me tea."

He was certain her eyes were sharply on him as he went, and when he returned, her full gaze swept him with a look in which he curiously read incredulity, with something beside that might have been fear or repulsion—he could not determine. She took the tea, but set it down untasted. A very queer old lady he thought her. He stood by in embarrassment, not knowingwhat to say. Glancing about for inspiration he was relieved to see Bartell bearing down upon him from the side of Mrs. Laithe. He came up jovially.

"I've been ordered to separate you two, Kitty. Young men aren't plentiful at this time, and Eleanor wants one."

"Thank you for bringing him, Chris." She gave Ewing a little nod, which he construed as his release, and he turned to meet Mrs. Laithe.

She sought his eyes with that swift look of apprehension which had before puzzled him, and threw another glance toward Mrs. Lowndes, who now chatted smilingly with Bartell. She seemed to be reassured.

"I do hope you've not been bored. No? I was afraid. Come and meet my sister," and she momentarily swept away his memories of the queer old lady by leading him to the girl in white who poured tea.

"Virgie, this is Mr. Ewing."

The girl looked up with that hint of shyness he had before observed in her. The eyes instantly recalled his own mountain lake when the light showed it to far, green depths. But they fell at once, for she inclined her head toward him, seized a cup and demanded sternly, "Cream or lemon—I mean I'm very glad to know you. Do you take sugar?"

In his own embarrassment he would have told her, but Mrs. Laithe broke in with her low laugh.

"He doesn't want tea, child, he only wants——"

The girl interrupted defensively, with a flutter of eyelids toward Ewing: "I can't rememberwhatthey like when they come back the second time. It's too much to expect."

"Your martyrdom is over, dear. No one wantsmore tea, and most of them are escaping. Talk to Mr. Ewing while I speed them."

The girl sank wearily into a chair, with a rueful glance at the table's disarray of cups and plates.

"I'll dream about tea to-night." Her hands met disconsolately in her lap.

"I suppose there was a lot of it," Ewing replied sympathetically.

"Why do they do so many insane things here?" demanded the girl. "They're always at something. Town is tiresome."

"But don't you live here?"

"Dear no! I went to live with mamma's sister up in New Hampshire when I was small, after mamma died. There was no one here to raise me. And now that I'm raised they want me back, but I shy at things so—dad says I'm not city broke. I shall hold off another year before I get into this sort of thing—" She waved an ably disparaging hand toward the backs of several unsuspecting people who lingered. Then she looked up to meet his laugh and laughed prettily with him. The two had found common ground by some freemasonry of the shy.

"Does it seem like a play to you, too?" he asked; "everyone playing a part and making you wonder how it's coming out?"

"Well"—she debated—"I used to have that, when I was at school and came here for holiday times. I was always expecting great things to happen then. But they never did. You'll be disappointed if you expect them. Everybody rides down Broadway in the morning and back again at night, and they make such a fuss about it that you think something worth while is comingoff, but it doesn't.Iknow." She achieved this with an air of mellowed cynicism that almost won his respect.

"But thingsmusthappen where there's so much life," he insisted.

"You're very young, aren't you?" she retorted. "Quite a boy, I should think. Sister said so. You'll see, though. It isn't one bit more a happening life than ours up at Kensington. Yours must have been the happening life, there in the West. Tell me about Clarence. Is he a real cowboy yet? He says he's a real one, but I couldn't believe it. Those I saw in the Wild West show looked as if they'd had to study it a long time. Can Clarence lasso a wild cow yet?" She leaned toward him with friendly curiosity. They were amazed half an hour later when they looked up to find Mrs. Laithe standing by them, the only other occupant of the room.

"You must come oftener," urged Mrs. Laithe. Her sister gave him her hand with a grip that made him wonder at its force.

He pushed through the evening crowd of Broadway, pleasantly reviewing his talk with the girl. At Forty-second Street it occurred to him that this was the first time he had walked the street unconscious of its throng. He had been self-occupied, like most of its members.

But the girl, he reflected, would go away. The friend, the near one, to take and give, man or woman, was still to be found.

THE men of the Rookery toiled, in the season of toil, with that blithe singleness of purpose they brought to their play. Ewing learned this the following morning when, after an hour in his own place, correcting some of those hasty first arrangements, he began an idling tour of the other studios. These occupied the two upper floors of the building, those beneath flaunting signs of trade on the ground-glass doors one passed in the long climb from the street.

From Baldwin's studio—Baldwin was sketching in from the model a kneeling Filipino prisoner with head thrown back and hands bound behind him—Ewing descended to Chalmers's place to find its owner finishing, with many swift pen strokes, the filmy gown of a débutante who underwent with downcast eyes the appraisal of an elderly beau. This absorbed and serious Chalmers was so unlike the frivolous night bird who reviled his art editor that Ewing forbore to distract him.

Griggs, in the studio back of Chalmers, was soberly work-bent over the wash-drawing of a sword fight, an illustration for what he confided to Ewing was the latest "high boots and hardware novel."

"One lovely thing," explained the artist, "they all take the same pictures—the plighted troth in the château garden; the lone hero spitting eight low-browed mercenariesof the scoundrelly duke at the end of the blind passage; 'nother fight on the main stairway of the palace, girl in view back of the hero, who's still acting the village cut-up with his little rapier; and the last picture, reward of hero in front parlor of the château, my Lord the Cardinal standing by to bless the happy pair, and the wicked Duke Bazazas being dragged out by loyal serving men to be finished off in the woodshed. The caption for that one always is, 'At Last, My Darling!' I just glance along the proofs until I light on those scenes. It saves a lot of reading, and I think of getting a set of rubber stamps to do the pictures with."

"You seem to be all black-and-white men here," remarked Ewing. "Aren't any of you painters? I've thought I'd like to work in color—to learn the trick of it."

Griggs glanced up at him, then smiled largely.

"The trick of color, eh? Sure! There's a boy upstairs next door to you—old Pop Sydenham. I'll take you up now, but don't let him hear you call it 'the trick of color.' Pop has been at that trick for over a century now—I believe he's a hundred and nineteen years old to-morrow. He's got a darned refined sense of color, too. I guess he's seen every color in the world, except some of those he puts on his own canvases. Some of those I don't believe he ever saw anywhere else. But Pop's worth knowing if you're keen to paint. He's a whole Art Students' League in himself. Come on, he'll be proud to have you notice him."

Wiping his hands neatly on his jacket—plainly a long-established custom with him—Griggs led the way to a room across the hall from Ewing's. He opened the door in answer to a call and pushed Ewing in beforehim. Sydenham leaned back on his stool to peer at them around the corner of his easel.

He was an old man, as Griggs had said. White hair fell in sparse locks over his ears, and his short, roughly pointed beard was scant enough to reveal sunken cheeks. But the face was tanned to a wholesome brown, and the eyes that glanced over his gold-rimmed spectacles were full of fresh good-humor. He nodded to Griggs and clambered down from his stool to greet Ewing.

"He's a line man now," announced Griggs after the introduction, "but some busybody has gone and told him that there's such a thing as real color. Of course I don't pretend to know myself, but I told him you did. He's your neighbor on this floor. Run in often and make yourselves at home with each other," he concluded cordially. "I must hurry back and finish a fight."

"May I look?" asked Ewing, his eyes running about the room to the many canvases.

"My summer's work is there—Look? yes; but I can't promise what you'll see. You bring your own eyes. I can't make eyes, too. If I only could—" He spoke with a slow, soft gentleness, his blue eyes half shut and dreamily distant. As Ewing turned to study a landscape leaning against the wall on a table near by, the painter climbed to his stool and twined his thin legs confusingly among its supports. Then facing his canvas and working a brush into the color on his palette he continued:

"Line is a fact. Color is only a sensation. Anyone can prove line, but to know color you must have imagination. If you lack that and do have a gift for humorous abuse you can be an art critic and make quite a bitof money, I'm told." He had begun to paint as he talked. He spoke with the same slow gentleness, even when a hint of seasoned bitterness betrayed itself.

One close look at the sketches about him had made Ewing rejoice that his own paintings were safe with Ben Crider. He studied the canvases before him with pleasure and dismay: wooded hills, grassy meadows, a park slope with a single birch; mist rising over a marsh; a country road narrowing into a blaze of sumach. They showed plainly enough, he thought, that color must be conveyed rather by implication than by blunt directness, and there, he felt, had been his own great blunder. He had been brutally direct.

Some of the pictures before him left him wanting a sharper definition of line, a more explicit modeling of surface, a treatment less timid, and the color itself, though it never failed to interest him, often puzzled or even irritated. He sought for words to disclose what he felt, his admiration for some of the sketches, his doubt or his rank disbelief as to others. But the old man suddenly swept the half-formed sentences from his mind.

A crash of falling furniture had resounded from the room of Dallas, forward on their own floor. From the studios below came other crashes, the noise of falling bodies, and a ringing, metallic clangor. Sydenham had paused at the first crash, then skipped nimbly from his stool, shouting gleefully, "There goes Griggs's suit of armor!" Then, to Ewing's amazement, he twitched the end of a cord that led to a high mahogany sideboard, causing a cigar box, a copper kettle, and a heavy volume of prints to fall with resoundings that must have carried to the farthest studio. The old manfaced him with the ecstatically deafened look of a child amid exploding firecrackers. Then, as he discerned Ewing's startled look, he explained:

"It's only a way the boys have every day at one o'clock. That Baldwin boy started it by upsetting a musket and a brace of cavalry sabers. Then Griggs followed with his armor. Then they all got to joining in. The Chalmers boy pulls over his easel, and I understand there's been a complaint from the people below; but it leaves us feeling rather friendly, you know, and we're sure it's time to eat." He looked at Ewing as if seeking to justify his complicity in so childish a performance. And Ewing, reading the look, helped him to reload his sideboard for the next day's disturbance. The copper kettle, book and cigar box—the latter containing half a dozen lumps of coal—were replaced on a thin board to which the string was attached.

Sydenham had meantime taken food from a curtained cabinet and was munching before his easel. He waved the freedom of his larder to Ewing. "There's bread and half a chicken, and pickles. There used to be ham, but I forget if it's there yet. Anyway, it wasn't the most expensive ham. I can't lose daylight by running out. The light changes while I eat. I'm no Joshua. What did Griggs say of you—crazy boy, that Griggs. Doing black and white, eh? Show me."

Ewing had helped himself to the bread and meat, and the two, eating casually, crossed the hall to his own room. His drawings were at hand and Sydenham looked at them as he munched, pausing critically now and then, a bit of bread midway to his mouth.

"Not bad, not bad! If you can do that well you ought to do better. But too many of you boys quitwhen you've learned to do something you can sell. It's respectable, of course, but shoemakers do as much, and you've no right to call yourselves artists for it. I'm afraid there isn't anything made in the world that some one won't buy. And peopleknowif their boots fit them, or if their bread is good, but they buy pictures in the dark. There wouldn't be so many men calling themselves painters if the public wasn't a better judge of sawed lumber or iron castings than it is of pictures. Where did you study?"

"My father taught me drawing. He warned me to learn that first."

"Father, eh? Well—" His eyes rose from the drawings, ranged along the top of the couch, to the portrait of Ewing's mother, hung between the two windows, and the speech died on his lips. He stepped back, bit into a reserve slice of bread and waved an inquiring chicken bone toward the picture.

"My mother," explained Ewing. "My father painted it."

Sydenham's jaw fell, and looking again at the portrait he muttered some low, swift phrase of bewilderment. Ewing waited for him to speak, but the old man only stared.

"It has good color, don't you think?" he ventured at last, but even the mention of color could not move Sydenham to speech. He absently consumed the remainder of his food and flicked crumbs from his frayed jacket.

"You look like her," he said at last, with so much the air of speaking to himself that Ewing made no answer. He moved toward the door with bowed head. At the threshold he looked back at Ewing a brief moment,then went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Ewing decided that his neighbor was a curious old man. Recalling other curious people he had met in this strange new world, he was reminded of the lady who had urged him to call on her. He was still ready to believe that anyone might wish to talk to him, or to hear him talk. But in spite of this, the old lady had been queer. From the table he picked up the card she had given him, studying the name and wondering what they might talk about.

He was still feeling this mild wonder when he rang the lady's bell at five o'clock.

TWO persons had waited for Ewing. Mrs. Lowndes was one of them, sitting forward in her chair and braced on its arms, though her head dropped now and then in forgetfulness. The other was a big, shambling old man, a dark man gone gray, his face needing the kindly, yellowish-brown eyes to save it from sternness. His thickets of eyebrows were joined in a half-humorous scowl of perplexity.

"I had to send for you, Fred. You and Herbert Sydenham are the only two left who were close to me then, and Herbert Sydenham—well—" she laughed a laugh of exquisitely humorous pain—"Herbert would have forgotten me any time these twenty years for a striking color scheme, a streak of unpaintable moonshine. It was you, Fred, or no one, and it hurt me so! All last night I was on the rocks being ground to bits. I knew you would say the wise thing."

The big man had risen to walk the floor, his thick shoulders heaving as if to throw off invisible burdens, his head shaking doggedly.

"Yes, Kitty, yes—" His voice was big but low, the voice of his whole being bent to soothe. He came to her side and reached down to take one of the frail, blue-veined hands between his own two, huge and hairy. They closed upon hers with a kind of awkward effectiveness.

"Of course you had to come to me, but I'm afraid all I can do is to brace you."

"I wanted you to be with me. I couldn't have borne it alone, Fred—his being here—Kitty's child."

"And you say he doesn't know?"

"I'm certain of it, and Eleanor Laithe doesn't know; but those are little things when I know."

"We'll see, Kitty—we'll see. Perhaps I can help. But I suspect it's one of those matters where you must be your own guide. You'll act as you feel; not as I think—not even as you think."

"Ellen is going to the door," she whispered, almost fiercely, bracing herself in the chair.

As the maid held back the curtain at the doorway, Ewing advanced uncertainly, an embarrassed smile on his lips, the look of one who would be agreeable if he knew how. He saw Mrs. Lowndes stiffly fixed in her chair, her white-crowned head thrown back, and he would have taken her hand but she diverted him from this.

"Mr. Ewing, my old friend, Dr. Birley."

Her voice was no longer halting and shallow, as it had been the moment before when her barriers were down. Ewing swiftly confirmed his impression of the previous day: this was a lady of immeasurable pride, a one-time beauty who perhaps treasured the authority her charms had once conferred upon her, wielding it with little old-fashioned graces. She seemed to him at the moment to be an almost excessively mannered person, interesting, but unapproachable.

He stopped on his way to her chair and shook hands with the big man, who had come forward. This person was quite as formidable as the curious old lady, but he was eminently kind of look.

"Sit here, Mr. Ewing." He indicated a chair.

"I asked you to come and see me—" The old lady had begun in low, even tones, but paused, and Ewing was again struck by this seeming of agitation which had made him remark her the day before.

"Mrs. Lowndes was interested to hear of your life in the West," said the big man easily, "and she was good enough to ask me to meet you also. We were both interested in knowing of you from the Bartells."

"There is so much we do not understand here in New York," put in Mrs. Lowndes, rather vaguely, Ewing thought. He looked from one to the other. The lady puzzled him, but the big man drew him from his embarrassment, helping him to an ease which he could hardly have achieved with his hostess alone.

Without knowing quite how he began he was presently talking. Unconsciously he directed his speech to the man, who kept kind eyes on him and led him by questions when he paused. He was aware that the woman listened and that her eyes searched his face, but he divined, without meeting them, that they were more curious than kind, and several times, as she moved in her chair, he seemed to feel sharp little points of hostility radiating toward him.

But the big man drew him more and more from the consciousness of her presence, so that he all but forgot her. It seemed entirely natural to him that he should be telling this friendly inquirer of his early life, the first memories of his father and mother, and of the queer, shifting home they had known. As he told of the death of his mother—both listeners had seemed strangely alert for that—he was startled by a sound from the lady—a catching of breath and a gasp of pain. He turnedquickly, but observed only a stiffly courteous gesture bidding him continue.

He stopped in confusion, feeling that a strange quiet had come upon the room. The questions from the big man had ceased, and the woman drooped in her chair until he could no longer distinguish her outline through the deepening dusk. Nor was there any sound when his own voice ceased. Neither figure stirred. He was oppressed by the awkwardness of it.

"I should have pulled up," he said, with an uneasy laugh. "I forgot I wasn't on a lone road."

There was still no sign from the woman, shrunk far into her chair, but the doctor rose at his speech with a half-muttered, "We're obliged to you." Ewing rose at the same time, with an impulse to break some strain that he felt himself sharing. The doctor reached out in the dusk and turned on an electric light that hung above the table, looking quickly at Mrs. Lowndes as he did so, for there had come from her a murmur of protest at the light. Ewing also looked at her from where he stood on the hearth rug. The lighting of the room had intensified some electrical current that pulsed from each to each. The woman returned Ewing's gaze with the absorption of one moved beyond all arts of convention. Her eyes glistened, ominous of tears, and her small, lean chin trembled as her lips parted. Ewing turned from her distress, appealing by look to the big man, who watched them both, but his gaze was at once drawn back to the woman. She rose from her chair with weak effort and faced him with something like wild impulse rather than intention, a look, a waiting poise, that shook him with fear of the unknown.

Slowly she brought her hands to a wringing claspat her breast. Her eyes were frankly wet now as she leaned and peered at him, holding him immovable. Twice her lips parted with dry little gasps, her hands working as if to ring the words from her choked throat.

"My boy!" It was so low that without the look of her lips as they shaped the words he could not have been sure.

"My boy—oh, my boy!" This time they were sharper though no louder, and Ewing's nerves tingled an alarm that ran to the roots of his hair. She came a half step toward him, and he felt that he was drawing her, divined that in another moment she would be throwing herself upon him in surrender to some emotional torrent that raged within her. He was powerless under this sudden, strange assault. Dumbly he watched her, closer now by another step, the clasped hands, fighting blindly toward him, with little retreats to her breast, her dry lips again shaping the words, "My boy—my boy!"

And then, even as his own arms were half extended with an instinctive saving movement—for the woman seemed about to totter—the stillness was broken by quick steps along the hall, the rattle of curtain rings along a rod, and the voice of the maid:

"Mr. Teevan, ma'am!"

There had been an instinctive wrenching asunder of the three at the first sound of steps. Yet traces of the stress under which they had labored were still evident to Randall Teevan as he entered. Mrs. Lowndes had turned to search among the magazines on the table—not before the little man had swept her with a comprehending eye flash.

Ewing, pleasantly delivered from a situation that had grown irksome, a situation rising from what he consideredthe too-ready sympathy of an emotional old woman, allowed his relief full play in the heartiness of his response to Teevan's greeting. The doctor had squared his shoulders to another pacing of the room.

Teevan, missing no item of the drama he had interrupted, chose for himself the rôle of blind unconsciousness. So well did he enact this that Mrs. Lowndes was convinced, and the belief aided her to recover a proper equanimity. The doctor surveyed the new actor with a skeptic keenness not so readily to be overcome.

One glance at Ewing's perturbed but mystified face assured Teevan that the climax of exposure had not been reached. He bustled amiably about the room, kissing the hand of Mrs. Lowndes, shaking the hand of the doctor, straightening a picture on the wall, and, at last, lighting a cigarette as he faced the room from his favorite post on the hearth rug.

Back to Index Next