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{{xx-larger|TOM BEAULING}}
 
{{smaller|BY}}
 
{{uc|[[Author:Gouverneur Morris (1876-1953)|Gouverneur Morris]]}}
 
[[File:The Century Company logo.png|75px|center]]
 
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1901
}}
}}

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{{c|
{{smaller block|Copyright, 1901, by {{sc|The Century Co.}}}}
 
{{xx-smaller|THE DE VINNE PRESS.}}
}}

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{{c|
{{smaller|{{uc|To [[Author:Richard Harding Davis|Richard Harding Davis]]}}}}
}}

—

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—2

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{{di|O}}NE spring, before the peaches were done blossoming or the cherry blossoms come to their best, Judge Tyler, of Mitford, sat in the cool of his study and considered what the year might bring. Although a sturdy reputation, a number of excellent investments, and sixty years of bachelor life rendered Judge Tyler independent of droughts, floods, high winds, or other criminal manifestations of weather, still there was the blood of stout Connecticut farmers in his veins, and the open pamphlet on his knees was Whalen's "Agricultural Prophecies." As he sat taking in the prophecies for pretty nearly what they were worth (and grumbling over his own sagacity), he threw a glance out the window, and ob-

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served a lady and a child walking along the road-side of the fence which divided his private garden from the public street. His eyes were almost back at certain statements regarding July wheat, when the tail of them caught an arm, blackgloved to the elbow, in the act of pushing open his smart green gate. A large picture-hat of soft colors, capping a slim figure in white, drooped up the gravel walk between the neat little six-inch square hedges of box. One black-gloved hand crumpled a white muslin handkerchief; the other rested picturesquely, but by no means unlovingly, on the further shoulder of a sturdy little boy of five. One of the white-figured curtains of the window put an abrupt end to observation.

It was Sunday, and Judge Tyler's ancient Irish servant was at the afternoon service of her church, so that the knocking which presently fell upon the door obliged him (not suffering from cheerfulness especially) to go and open it himself.

The lady stood weakly on the thresh-

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old confronting him. Sunken cheeks and big eyes, feverishly bright, told a tale. She coughed.

"Consumption," said the judge to himself, methodically, as you would file a paper for reference.

"You don't know me?" said the lady.

"No," said the judge, stiffly; "I do not place you." For all his judicial certainty of speech, there was a something about the lady which Judge Tyler did recognize. It was as you recall a poem whose title, purpose, and moral you have forgotten, but of whose prosody one haunting line remains. The haunting line was a big, sweet mouth.

Judge Tyler glanced down at the child, and was slightly scandalized to perceive that so young a male wore trousers. The child had a big, sweet mouth also. His smiled without volition.

"You don't remember me, Judge Tyler," said the lady. She parted her big, sweet mouth into a deprecating smile, which instantly began to tremble at the corners. Then she interlaced her fingers,

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without closing them. The familiar gesture at once brought the lady to her proper niche in Judge Tyler's gallery of recollection.

"I remember you perfectly, Harmony," he said. There was neither surprise nor warmth in his tone, nor indeed coldness, rather a judicial tinct of noncommission. Whatever the tone, the lady's eyes drooped, almost tragically, before it, and she laid her hand with a charming free-arm gesture back on the rosy infant's shoulder. Judge Tyler, easily sure of himself, waited.

"This is my son—Tom," said the lady. Then she swayed, and Judge Tyler thrust out his right arm to prevent her falling.

"I won't fall," she said, as if that was the gist of her tragedy. "Really, I won't." It sounded like a daughter promising her mother to be good.

"Perhaps you would better step inside," said Judge Tyler.

"Yes, that's it," said she, "if I can just sit down a moment."

Her hand rested lightly into the judge's

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crooked arm. He could feel that it was shaking. Once it jerked nervously.

"I couldn't go to any one else," she said; "you see, I am not well."

Although his manner was too grave and collected to be reassuring, the judge conducted his visitor with courtesy to the study and placed her in a deep chair, having first softened its back with a small brown cushion. When she was seated, he stood before the mantel and looked at her interrogatively. The infant stood sturdily by the left arm of his mother's chair. The lady glanced deprecatingly from the infant to the judge, and smiled her big, sweet smile.

"Children have such absurd memories," she said.

The judge understood perfectly, but preferred to say: "Do I understand you to indicate, Harmony, that you wish to speak with me alone?"

"Oh, yes, if you please," said the lady. "Tom, go with Judge Tyler."

The infant advanced upon the judge, or rather from beneath him,—under-

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mined him, as it were,—and looked him in the face, as if to determine whether or not that black-clothed, gray-headed man was trustable. In the course of his life Judge Tyler had spoken to more felons than children. He was quite at a loss.

"Come," he said presently, in a gruff voice, and forced himself to hold out a finger. The child's hand closed on the finger as a grown man's hand closes on money that is owing to him. An ingratiating feeling started, with the brazen intention of getting into his heart, to run up the judge's arm. He managed, not too easily, to check it at the elbow.

"Be good, Tom!"

In the dining-room the blinds were drawn. A few blue-and-white plates, "Independence Hall;" "Old South;" "The Franklin Elm," New Haven; "Mount Vernon;" a steel-engraving, "{{lang|fr|[[Author:William Shakespeare (1564-1616)|Shakespere]] lisant son drame de [[Macbeth (Shakespeare)|Macbeth]] devant La Reine Elisabeth et sa cour}};" a copperplate, "Delia Hid in Shades Eludes her Eager Swain," and a copy of a copy of Van Dyke's portrait of

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himself ornamented the walls. The head of a cow-faced moose looked out alarmingly over the top of an ugly black-walnut sideboard. His neck was lost in shadow, and you might have stretched your imagination to believe that a stall containing the animal's body and legs was situated immediately behind that offensive piece of furniture. Judge Tyler lifted the child into the arm-chair at the head of the solid mahogany.

"There," said the judge. He reached the door, stopped, turned, and went over to the sideboard with somewhat of the stealthy manner with which we may assume that a thief moves. Out of a Canton-ware bowl he took a fig, hesitated, and took another. These he thrust hastily into the child's hand.

"There," he said gruffly.

The child eyed first the judge and then the figs.

"Don't eat too fast," said the judge, still more gruffly. He hurried out of the room, closing the door behind him with something more than firmness and some-

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thing less than a bang. He could hear the lady in the study coughing.

The child, in imitation of the dusty mouse, began a procrastinating attack upon the figs.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|Judge Tyler}} cleared his throat.

"He is a manly little fellow," he said. "Thank you," said the lady.

The judge seated himself tentatively on the edge of a chair, and waited for her to explain.

"I hated to have to come to you," she began.

"Since you have come," said the judge, tartly, "it will hardly be necessary to go into that."

"But you are so just," she began again. The judge acknowledged the compliment with an impatient but momentary contraction of the eyebrows.

"I couldn't go to my own sister," she said, "could I?"

"I don't know why you couldn't," said Judge Tyler.

"I simply couldn't," she said plain-

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lively. "Dorothy was always so hard. Even when we were little, though I was older, she used to find fault with me on ethical grounds. I couldn't go to Dorothy—" The lady was stopped by a fit of coughing. Then she said, with her wide, trembling smile:

"You see? I had to come to somebody, and I chose you, because I know that even if you are g-g-gruff—"

"I hope," said the judge, hastily, "that this cough is nothing serious."

"Oh, but it is!" she said. "I have had it three years. We were barn-storming with '[[Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)|Julius Cæsar]]'—doing one-night stands in the country towns—I was ''Cæsar's'' wife—"

Judge Tyler could not explain why it suddenly and quite inapplicably occurred to him that Caesar's wife was above suspicion.

"And I caught cold—''this'' cold—and so I have come to you to ask a great, great service—I am afraid an impossible service."

The Judge bowed.
{{nop}}

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"It's about Tom."

The judge looked troubled.

"Don't say you won't before you hear me out. Is he—is Tom out of harm's way?"

"I hope so," said Judge Tyler, his mind reverting with a twinge of agony to certain breakables in the dining-room.

"Then that's all right," said the lady. "Judge Tyler, what is to become of Tom if I die?"

That sort of sudden question is always difficult to answer, and painful.

"If you would care to put me in possession of the facts," said Judge Tyler, "we could then perhaps talk of your son with better mutual understanding."

"That would be better," said the lady. "But you will let me do it my own way, won't you? It makes it so much harder if you ask questions. It's hard enough, anyway."

The judge looked at his watch.

"I can give you just an hour," he said,

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and he added, almost kindly: "Will you take something before you begin—a glass of wine? You will forgive me remarking, Harmony, that you look very ill."

"I am," she said gravely, "but I won't take anything, please."

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{{di|Y|fl="}}OU know what sort of a home life I had," said the lady. "I used to call my father and my mother the last of the Puritans. They were so good and strict, such church-goers, so upright, so God-fearing, so hard on children. I think my father and my mother were never children themselves. They were born grown up. They were never tempted by light things. Dorothy was like them. She used to sew little samplers, and ask God to punish her if she was wicked. But I wasn't like that. I was very joyous, and glad that I was pretty. I used to stick flowers in my hair and dance before a glass. You remember our house—all horse-hair and mahogany, a stuffed duck under glass in the parlor. Fancy! The rooms were always darkened when the sun was shining its brightest. Our

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house was cool on the hottest days. But the air in it was never fresh, always stuffy—old-fashioned air. I remember when my uncle died. I saw him in his coffin. Fancy letting a child—a little child—see a dead person in a coffin! It seemed to me that his coffin was like a small edition of our house—a stricter interpretation of the spirit of our house. I remember thinking, though I was only a little child, that my father and my mother and my sister and I had all been born buried, and that when we really and truly died we would simply be put tato smaller coffins. Our house was a coffin that you could breathe in; a real coffin was smaller and you could not breathe in it—that was the only difference.

"My father and my mother loved me. I know that because one day they prayed for the heathen in foreign lands, and I asked them why they did that, and they said it was because they ''loved'' the heathen in foreign lands. And they used to pray for me, so they must have loved me too. But they didn't love me the way I

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wanted to be loved. They never kissed me when I had flowers in my hair and red cheeks from dancing, when I looked pretty and most like a child, but every morning, after morning prayers, and every evening before going to bed. They never kissed me on Sunday. When I had diphtheria—you remember how sick I was—and the danger was past, they did not cry over me and be fatherly and motherly, but called up the servants and read a lot of stiff prayers, and then they kissed me solemnly, and said they were glad their little girl had not been taken. And Dorothy, little Dorothy—what do you think she said? She said it was a great relief to her that I had not died then, for, in her judgment, I was not fit to die.

"I was never the kind that is 'fit to die,' Judge Tyler. I was only fit to live, to be gay, to laugh, to dance, to sing, to play, to make people laugh, and later to make some man happy. For I was a good girl, even if I was only fit to live. If I could only make you understand how terrible home was to me. I—"
{{nop}}

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The lady pressed the handkerchief to her lips lightly and coughed. Then she went on:

"Children can bear almost anything. They have to. But when I grew up, I could not bear it any longer. I was eighteen that spring. They did many things to poor New England in the old days, and in our days. They drove out love and gaiety and the pride of life, but they could not drive out spring. Every year spring came to New England, and begged people to live and be happy. But people only stopped their ears, and hid in their houses, and prayed to a stiff God, when the real God had sent them spring. That spring I had it out with my father and my mother. And when I had told them about life and sunlight and gladness, they f sighed and said I was no child of theirs, but a penance for their sins. And they I believed it. And they prayed for me and for strength to bear their burden. When they had done praying, I went away."

"It broke their hearts," said the judge,

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coldly. "They loved you very deeply, Harmony."

"Yes," said she, "I broke their hearts, for theirs was a gospel of forgiveness, and they could not find it in their hearts to forgive. They would not take me back. Did you know that? When I saw how I had hurt them, I offered to go back. Did you know that? I offered to go back and live in that house. And when I made that offer, I had done nothing in any way shameful. But they said I had made my bed and I must lie in it. And I was glad of that, for, though it was hard and narrow, I loved the bed I had made for myself. The sun waked me.

"That summer I sang at Peaks Island in Portland Harbor. And the people up there liked me and the songs I sang. And the other people in the company were friendly with me because I was good and only wanted to live and let live. One night a man who was going to put on a comic opera in New York heard me sing, and offered me a part in it. Think how happy I was! Think of getting to New

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York the very first year I I was so triumphant, so gay—and it was then that I offered to go back and live with my people. Think of what it must have cost to make the offer, for I was sure—oh, so sure!—they would want me, and I didn't—I couldn't want to go!

"So when summer was over I went to New York, full of the part I was to sing, and so happy and eager to have people like me and be a success. And then troubles began. It seemed that nobody had a clear title to the new opera, and there were disputes and litigations, and finally the manager washed his hands of the whole thing and put on a play instead. But there was no part in it for me, and by that time winter was half over, and I could not get any work. I went from manager to manager, and the high and mighty ones I could not even get to see, and the others had no place for me, and I could not get any other kind of work to do that I ''could'' do. And I had no money—no money, nothing to pawn, no one to turn to. Do you know I thought, then, of

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coming to you? But I was ashamed. I was ashamed to then—and—and—now I'm not."

"It would perhaps have been better if you had." said the judge.

"Yes, I wish I had," said she, "and—and I don't. Even when I thought that I might have to starve, I was happier than I had been in my father's house. That winter my father died. And I could not go to his funeral, because I could not buy a ticket to Mitford. It was so pitiful, his dying like that, because I thought that if it hadn't been for me he would have lived longer. At the very end of winter I got work to do. But it was too late."

A feverish color spread up from the lady's throat over her cheeks and forehead, and she had another fit of coughing.

"This is too much for you, Harmony," said the judge.

"No," she said; "it's all I'll have to do. I've got just enough strength to do it. Please get me some water."

The judge hurried out, and presently returned with a glass of water. The lady

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took a sip, and then, balancing the glass on the chair arm, continued:

"One day there was a wet snow falling, and nothing but hopelessness in the world. And a man came into my life. He only meant to be friendly; I know that. And we were just good friends. He helped me through the winter, and I took his help because I promised myself that I would pay him back—every penny. And we were just good friends for a long, long time. And when we stopped being that, it was all my fault. I got to care about him, you see. I got to care about him. Then I got a part in a melodrama that was going on the road—but it was too late.

"So you see I made life very terrible for myself. People don't realize how terrible a look can be. I got plenty of terrible looks, and from worse women than I was. And I made up my mind one night—we were on board the ''City of Cleveland,'' going to Detroit—that when the rest had gone to bed I would get out through my stateroom window, and over the rail,

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and have done with it. I hoped my body would sink and never be found. I don't know quite what happened, but suddenly I knew that it wasn't myself I loved any more, but some one else. And then I couldn't bear to die. Things got easier after that, because I was standing them for some one else—for my little son. And now—now that I have done my best and worked my hardest for him, and it wasn't good enough or hard enough—what is to become of him—what is to become of him? That's why I have come to you to help me. Won't you tell me what will become of him?"

"Do I understand that you are out of work now?" said the judge.

"Out of work!" she cried excitedly. "It isn't that—you don't understand. I'm dying!"

Judge Tyler could not find anything to say. He stuttered a word, and waited for her to finish.

"Don't you suppose," she said, "that people know when they are dying? I have known for three years that it had

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to come. I have known it ever since the night I was ''Caesar's'' wife, and it was so cold. I got this cough then, and it's done for me. Won't yon tell me what to do about Tom? I have been a good mother to him, Judge Tyler. I have worked and slaved for him, and it's got to count for something. Won't you tell me what's to be done—won't you?"

This last very pitifully. Judge Tyler was not unmoved, but his keen sense of justice told him that the woman should not have come to him.

"Harmony," he said, "was there no one else to whom you could go?"

"What do you mean?" she said. "I thought you—"

"You don't understand, perhaps," said he. "I'm going to ask you a question—a painful question."

"Yes."

"Harmony, what was the man's name?"

She breathed in once, hard.

"I don't know," she said.

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{{di|Y|fl="}}OU don't know?"

"I was very proud," she said. "He never told me his name; I never asked him."

"I don't understand that kind of pride," said Judge Tyler.

"You would if you were a woman," said she.

"Perhaps," a little dryly. "Perhaps I would. But as it is, I do not. You tell me that you do not know this man. Does he—did he ever know that you had a son?"

"How should he know? I went out of his life, he out of mine."

"He must be found," said Judge Tyler. "This is his affair, not mine."

"Yes," she said plaintively, "I suppose so, but—"

"Have you no means of tracing him?"
{{nop}}

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"I did—I did try to find him," she said. "Here." She took a small leather case containing a photograph out of her pocket and handed it to the judge. He looked at the photograph attentively.

"This is you and he?" he said.

"Yes."

The lady in the photograph was certainly Harmony. You could tell that by the eyes and the mouth. It was too big, as mouths go, but so very sweet and mobile as to make you forget that it was not the most perfectly sized and beautiful mouth extant. The eyes were too far apart, of an untroubled, starry kind; they sometimes made you look away from the mouth. But the present Harmony was only a pale, tired, thin copy of the Harmony in the photograph. It made Judge Tyler start to see her again as he remembered her.

"I've changed, haven't I?" said she.

Women say so many things that only women can answer.

"I might not know this man if I met him on the street," said Judge Tyler. "It

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is already faded, and was taken evidently at an age when the marks of a man's character, whatever it may be, are still held in abeyance by the youth of his face. Here are no lines of race, no marks of profession. Five years may have changed his face completely. He may have worked, he may have idled. He may wear a mustache, he may be dead. Have you no idea what his name was?"

"No."

"But he must have had a name that you called him byf

"Would that matter?" she asked. "I—I gave him that name."

"Then it doesn't matter what it was," said Judge Tyler, hastily. He glanced at the photograph again. "He looks like a gentleman."

"He was," said the lady, in a tone implying that she expected contradiction.

Judge Tyler started to return the photograph, but his judicial habit of cross-questioning even inanimate objects caused him first to turn it over and examine the back. The cardboard was yel-

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low with age, and stained. In the center was an object in gilt purporting to be the ferocious head of a winged gryphon, the trade-mark of a once popular firm of photographers. Across the upper righthand corner a name and date were written, with violet ink, in a fine, slanting, feminine hand.

"There is a name written here," said Judge Tyler. "Did you know that?"

"Yes. I wrote it there—it's my son's name."

''"Tomas Beauling,"'' read the judge. "May I ask why you call him that?"

"I call him that," she said, "because it belonged to a brave and loyal gentleman who asked me to marry him, and wanted to take my sin on his own head. He is dead now, and I want my son to have his name. I know he wouldn't mind."

"I have never heard the name," said the judge. "I presume he was an actor?"

''"I'' think he was," said the lady; "but the world wasn't good to him. You wouldn't have heard of him, though,

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even if he had been celebrated, for Beauling was only his real name—he only told it to me."

"I see," said the judge.

"And I want my son," she went on, "to grow up as good and loyal a gentleman as Tomas Beauling was; and I have come to you, Judge Tyler, for help. Won't you help me about it? I beg your pardon." She began to cough again.

"You place me in a very difficult position," said Judge Tyler; "pardon me, if I am blunt If you were to die, the position would not be altered. I am willing to do anything you ask—in reason; but you cannot expect me to provide for your son's future, or to act as his guardian. I have no gift with children. The habits of my life are opposed to any change, and if I undertake to help you in this matter it can only be with advice. You did right in coming to me, perhaps. But if, as you say, you are seriously ill, you must go to your sister Dorothy. She is the proper person to appeal to. And I feel sure that if anything were to happen

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to you, she would feel it her duty to take your son into her own family and do by him as by her own."

"You ''advise'' me," she said excitedly, "to leave my son with a woman who would bring him up as I was brought up—in a cold, dark house, with a cold, dark God in the parlor and a red-hot hell in the basement! That's what you would advise ''me'' to do!"

"Don't talk so wildly. Harmony," said Judge Tyler.

"Do you know what I hoped you would say," she said, without heeding—"what I expected you to say? I expected you to say, 'Harmony, I will look after your son to the best of my ability; I will be good to him, and see that he is brought up in the sunlight.' I expected you to take all the cares and worries of dying off my hands. And instead of that you say, 'Harmony, before you die, it would be perhaps advisable if you buried your son alive!{{' "}}

With that she burst into tears.

"Harmony," said the judge, "I don't

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know why you should expect these things of me."

"Because," she sobbed, "I thought you had a heart as big as a church. I thought you would love poor little Tom the moment you saw him, and want him for your son. 'Who can help loving Tom?' I said. But instead of that, you have no heart at all. It has been dried out of you." She got up. "Get me my boy," she said. "I will take him away; we won't trouble you any more. Even I can't breathe in your uncharitable house. G't me my child before he smothers. I said, when I knew I had to die, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' And that comforted me so! I said, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' Oh, I thought I knew you! I thought your heart was as warm as an oven, but it's as cold as my father's God."

She made three quick steps for the door, staggered, and, before Judge Tyler could get to her, fell full length.

Blood came out of her mouth, and she died.

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{{di|D}}EATH is too difficult Even the corpse of a house-fly must be disposed of by a good housekeeper. How pleasant if bodies vanished as utterly as entities!

The death of humans is no bursting of soap-bubbles; as surely the colors and the life go out, but the dirt remains. The crematory is far, the grave to be digged; the buzzard more horrible than the worm. Furthermore, between these ultimates and the clay bulks the cunctating law with inquiry and jury of Fabian coroners, crawls the undertaker's black delivery wagon, intrudes his office,—an infant's casket, white but shop-worn, in the window,—his smug indifference, his catalogue and lists of prices. Looms, beyond these unavoidables, the church, the great slow sentences, the delaying sweet-

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ness of Chopin and Mendelssohn, the lyric voices of little boys, flowers—so sweet that you close your eyes and believe yourself at a wedding; and last the grave, and the cynical "Dust to dust," or the furnace and the undoing heat.

O Lord, make of me a conjurer's coin! Now you see it—now you don't.

Something like this went through Judge Tyler's mind when he had lifted Harmony from the floor, and found that she was really dead. Had she been an unknown, he could hardly have felt the responsibility to be more heavy and unjust. Mingled with pity and the proper feelings that go with all hearts was a righteous resentment against her for dying. But his predominating, first, middle, and last thought was of the little boy waiting in the dining-room for his mother's call.

Judge Tyler was a brave man, but he paused for a moment and looked upward at his duty, as one wearied with climbing looks upward to the mountain-top. He was strongly armored, but the present

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crisis struck through a weak place in the harness and pierced him. He hated the thought of telling that child what he had to tell. And, worse, he hated the growing probability that the child would tire of the dining-room and come to find his mother. So, after a moment's reflection, he compromised with his duty and put it off. He stepped into the hall, locked the study door behind him, and put the key in his pocket. Then he went into the dining-room.

"Tom," he said, "I am going to take you to visit two little children up the street. And see, we '1 take all these nuts and raisins, and you can play at dinner parties till I come for you." He held out his hand, and little Beauling slid off his chair and took it.

First they crossed the road, and Judge Tyler left little Beauling in the front yard of the house opposite. He himself went in and spoke to the doctor, whose house it was, giving him the key to the study door and asking him to go and look after the dead woman. Then Judge Ty-

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ler resumed his tutelary hold of little Beauling's hand' and led him quite a long way up the village street, under the greening elms, until they came to another house. Here they rang the bell. And a woman with a tired, girlish face, clothes that were dark and not pretty, and dark hair done as plainly as possible, came to the door. Judge Tyler called her "Dorothy," and asked her if she would do him the favor of letting his little friend Tom Beauling play with her children for a while. But the woman called Dorothy said that ''her'' children were doing their lessons. Then Judge Tyler said, "On such a bright afternoon!" and he went on and told the woman that she ''must'' let little Beauling play with her children that afternoon, and that he would tell her the reason why, later; and that she herself must come with him to his house, for it was more important than all other things. So the woman reluctantly consented, and having called her children, two grave, tiny, male and female nonentities, she turned little Beauling over to their mer-

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cies and enjoined goodness upon all three. Then she got her hat—not a great, beautiful picture-hat of soft colors, like Beauling's mother's, but a hard little, tight little thing, that could not have been forced from one side to the other—and went with Judge Tyler. Beauling handed over the nuts and raisins to his grave little cousins, and they, having certain traits of ungravity still left in them, turned at once into charming mice, and joyous things were entered upon, for the cat was away.

When Judge Tyler and Dorothy had walked a certain way. Judge Tyler cleared his throat and said:

"About an hour ago Harmony came to my house, Dorothy—your sister Harmony. She left her little boy with me."

Dorothy wrinkled her unlined brow.

"I never heard of her marriage," she said.

"I may as well tell you at once, Dorothy," said Judge Tyler, "that Harmony was not married."

Dorothy's tired, girlish face burned a

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bright, peony red. Although she had borne children, she would have blushed to have heard her own husband make the same statement about a total stranger.

"Oh!" she gasped.

"Out in the world," said Judge Tyler, "these things are better understood than we understand them here. Her story was to me most pitiful. I heard what she had to tell, and she was greatly to be pitied."

Suddenly Dorothy stopped stock still.

"Do you mean to tell me, Judge Tyler, that you brought a child that was not honestly come by to play with ''my'' children?"

Judge Tyler was so taken aback by this attack that he gasped.

"Why, Dorothy," he said presently, "what earthly harm can ''any'' little child do?"

"It's the idea," she said; "the idea is—it's—nauseating."

That was strong language for Dorothy. It had a peculiar effect upon Judge Tyler. He began to quiver and get white in the face.
{{nop}}

-37

"Nauseating!" he said—''"Nauseating!'' Then it's you that are nauseating, young woman—you and your kind. You needn't come any further. I do not need you. Your poor sister is dead in my house—but I will look after that. Go back to your children—God help them, and may God help such women as you not to have children!—but don't you speak or look a word at Tom Beauling! You understand me? I will come and take him out of your house as soon as I can."

"I did not know that Harmony was dead," said Dorothy, with feeling. "I shall have to go on now."

"If you are coming, come," said Judge Tyler; "but if you have anything to say about your sister or the boy, I beg you to remember that there is such a thing as decency."

Judge Tyler pushed open the gate of his yard, and held it back with old-fashioned courtesy.

-38

{{di|T}}OM BEAULING sat on the floor of Judge Tyler's study and played with a set of Indian chess-men, carved of ivory (he did not break one), while the earth was being filled into his mother's grave. Between Judge Tyler and the doctor across the way, the needful had been accomplished as rapidly as possible, and, with the assistance of sister Dorothy's littleness of soul, several important things had been discussed and decided. Harmony's identity had been concealed from the village; she had been buried as a stranger, and Tom Beauling, for all the village knew, was or was not the dead stranger's legitimate child.

Judge Tyler and the doctor walked slowly back from the funeral. The problem of Tom Beauling confronted them.
{{nop}}

-39

"I can't keep him." said Judge Tyler; "it's out of the question. You must see that for yourself."

"No," said the doctor, "I can't imagine you bringing up a child. You are totally unsuited."

"It isn't that," said Judge Tyler, with some resentment; "but it isn't my duty to saddle myself with somebody else's brat, and I won't do it."

"Poor little beggar!" said the doctor, reminiscently. And then, in a tone of convinced agreement: "You are absolutely right; it would be ridiculous selfimposition."

"Yes, wouldn't it!" said the judge, comforted.

"Of course he must go to Dorothy," began the doctor, slowly.

"No, he sha'n't!" said Judge Tyler, firmly.

"Wait—wait," said the doctor. "You will see it in a minute. After all, Dorothy is his aunt; she has children of her own, good principles—"

"Hunh!" exclaimed the judge.
{{nop}}

-40

"Yes, he must go to Dorothy," said the doctor, cheerfully.

"No, he sha'n't," said the judge; "even if Dorothy went down on her knees and begged to be allowed to have him,—and I dare say that is what her God or her holy husband is suggesting to her as a penance for her sins,—I would refuse. His mother was set against it, and for reasons which are obvious to all. I told her she would better go to Dorothy,—I assure you I spoke thoughtlessly,—and she said that was like advising her to bury her boy alive. Harmony was quite right."

The vehemence with which he said this left Judge Tyler quite out of breath.

"There!" he gasped.

"Poor little beggar!" said the doctor, reflectively.

"Harmony was quite right," repeated the judge.

"People who have had enough trouble usually are," said the doctor.

"I intend to do what is right," said the judge.
{{nop}}

-41

"Of course you do. I was sure of it," said the doctor, in an aggravating voice.

"What do you mean by that?" snapped the judge.

"Oh! you'll send him to some expensive institution, and—"

"Just what I will do," cried the judge.

"Poor little beggar!" said the doctor.

"He's damned lucky to have anybody do anything for him," said the judge, angrily.

"Quite so," said the doctor. . . . "He's a bright little cuss."

Two-o'clock dinner was served to the gentlemen. Little Beauling, an unabridged between him and his chair, joined them. But he sat silent and said never a word, for he had learned that his mother would not come back to him any more. He was too good a gentleman to cry at table, but he could not eat. Later, when dinner was over and the judge and the doctor took to their cigars, he was given in charge of the aged cook, and on her flat calico bosom he poured out his sorrow. And when the cup was empty of

-42

liquid bitterness, and no more tears would come, he was given to eat. But not real food; spoiled children food—bread spread with butter, butter spread high with brown sugar, crunching deliciously; jumbles, each with a hole in the middle which you could stick your finger through, raspberry shrub—the food upon which little gods are fed—tarts, and (I whisper it) a glass of apple brandy. With that he slept, and while his earthly disposition was being argued in the dining-room he dreamed of three divers dogs that gamboled gloriously in a meadow, and in his dream he gave delicious chase, and rolled over and over in the delightful grass. But the pitiful cook looked upon his face in sleep, and when he wrinkled up his little nose with the ardor of pursuit, rocked her body and wept, as is customary with the Irish when moved by little things or great.

"First and last," said Judge Tyler, "I will not allow my feelings to dictate to me in this matter. The boy is bright and pretty, and I won't say that it

-43

wouldn't be a pleasure to have him in the house for a time. But to keep him as he is at present—a quiet, shy, well-mannered little cuss—is, you must admit, out of the question. The ordinary boy grows up disappointing, and slaps his parents and benefactors right and left. I can't be expected to let myself in for anything of that kind. Furthermore, this boy comes of parents that were—I will not say vicious, though it is probable his father was—say, very indiscreet; stands a pretty poor show of turning out well—a worse show than most boys, and that's saying a great deal; and besides," concluded Judge Tyler, triumphantly, "even you will admit that a child ought to be brought up by a woman. There are things about children that only women understand."

The doctor winked to himself.

The gentlemen continued their discussion, when presently, while Judge Tyler was in the midst of another long protest, the door-bell rang, and after an interval Dorothy, pale and determined, walked

-44

into the dining-room. The gentlemen arose at exactly the same moment.

"I hope you will excuse me for coming in like this." said Dorothy, firmly; "but my husband thinks I owe you an apology, Judge Tyler, for letting you take so much trouble that we should have taken—"

Judge Tyler dismissed the apology with a wave of his hand.

"It's pretty hard to suffer for other people's faults," she went on. "But perhaps we are made to, to make up for something wrong we have done ourselves. Anyway, we can't judge about that, and so I've come to say that I am willing to take charge of Harmony's child. My husband thinks I ought to. So I've come to take him home."

Judge Tyler shot an instantaneous "I-told—you-so" at the doctor.

"Dorothy," he said, "I'm glad that you've come to see the matter in this light, and by making the offer you are doing your duty, I cannot believe gladly, but I will say cheerfully, and in a manner

-45

highly gratifying to me. But you can put your mind quite at rest, for I am not going to hold you to your offer."

Dorothy looked surprised.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Simply this," said Judge Tyler; "if your sister wanted you to have her child she would have gone to you directly and said so. But she came instead to me, Dorothy, and made it very evident that she did not want her child to be brought up in your house. I need not go into the reasons. You and she looked at life differently. I will not say that your way was wrong, but it was not hers. The other day, when I called on you, your children were studying their lessons; your eldest child is five years old. It was a bright, beautiful afternoon. Well, Harmony's children would have been playing in the yard. Don't make me put it stronger."

Dorothy was pained and hurt for a moment.

"How like Harmony to hate me!" she said; "but, of course, I have no rights in the matter, and I may as well say that

-46

I am glad you don't want me to have the child. I only offered to take him because I thought it was my duty to."

Judge Tyler shifted uneasily.

"I suppose you are going to keep him, then," she said.

"I!" exclaimed the judge. "Certainly not."

"Too absurd!" put in the doctor, under his breath.

"Oh, no!" said the judge, "I sha'n't keep him."

"Then what are you going to do with him?" said Dorothy.

Judge Tyler cleared his throat, and, in the tone of one describing the landscape:

"I have the address of a home for orphans in New York, where I am told that children are well looked after by kindly people. I have quite made up my mind that unless something better offers—"

"Then you're ''not'' going to adopt him?" said Dorothy, as if the fact continued to surprise.

"Why should I?" said the judge—"Why should I?"
{{nop}}

-47

"Everybody thinks you are," said Dorothy.

"Then everybody is wrong," said the judge, sharply.

"Poor little beggar!" said the doctor.

-48

{{di|J}}UDGE TYLER and Tom Beauling stood hand in hand on the platform of the station at Mitford. It was a bright, blue day in the morning.

Presently, far up the track they saw a puff of white smoke, and after an interval came a hoarse whistle. Then there was a distant rumble that grew momentarily louder, and soon the local charged around a curve and came straight at them. Little Beauling looked up to see if the judge was afraid, but he was not. The local grew bigger and louder, the rails trembled, people with satchels came out of the waiting-room; the local began to slow up, the engine crawled by, the tender, the baggage-car, the smoker—then the whole thing stopped with a cough, went on an inch, and stopped, hissing. All got aboard and found seats.

-49

By the greatest good fortune, the judge and Tom Beauling got a seat all to themselves, and Beauling was so glad that the judge elected to sit by the aisle instead of by the window. Newspapers were unfolded, spectacles put on, and the train started—that is, the train stayed where it was and the landscape started. Infinitely interesting things went by the window. Those close to the track went by so rapidly that you could not study them; those far away went slowly, and afforded a good, long look. At one place there was a tree with a robin sitting on the tip-top. The tree didn't behave well to the robin, for without a word of warning it jerked itself out from under him and left him in the air. And, of course, the robin, to keep from falling, had to flap and flap. He couldn't have been a very well robin, for no matter how hard he flapped he just managed to stay in the same place. And, of course, as the place moved almost as fast as the rest of the landscape, he was soon out of sight, and little Beauling could never know how

-50

it all ended. Pretty to see was the blue water beyond the land. Interesting were the white-sailed ships that could not stand up straight. Fascinating the back yards, with little boys playing ball in them. But more pretty, interesting, and fascinating was the white-faced youth who went up and down the aisle with a basketful of candies, caramels, and books. What a beautiful, generous nature that youth had, in spite of his hard face! For, like Prince Bountiful, he gave everybody a box of candy or a book for nothing. Insisted on giving it to them; wouldn't take no for an answer. And—O baseness of human nature! O despicable performance on the part of Prince Bountiful!—for, sinking to the lowest of creations, an Indian-giver, he went sneaking about and took back all the presents he had given. And when nobody was looking! Nobody but Tom Beauling. He saw—and despised.

Whenever the landscape had a station it stopped, so that the people who didn't like that part of the landscape could get into the train and wait till a part they

-51

liked better came along, or that the people who did like that part could get out of the train and stay there. One man was so afraid that a station would go by before he could get on it, that he jumped out of the train while the landscape was still in motion and fell on his nose. And a woman was so curious about it that she dropped all her important bundles (presents for her children, Beauling conjectured) and ran to see what had happened to the man. But the man got up, and was very angry with the woman for looking at him. Just as the station moved off, Beauling saw the woman pick up the presents for her children that she had dropped. He was very curious about one. It was in a paper bag, and seemed to have melted, for it all ran out of the bottom of the bag—yellow and white. The woman dropped it, and the man drew back his foot to kick it. But at that the station disappeared, and the man and the woman, and Beauling never knew whether the man managed to kick the poor melted present or not.

He looked up at the judge, and found

-52

that the judge was looking down at him. He smiled at the judge. The judge hastily turned to his paper.

And now the landscape became fuller of houses, fields were fewer, trees misshapen. Some of the trees had boards hung about their necks. The boards were painted bright colors. Shadows darkened the train, roared, and went by. Soon a man shambled through the train and lighted the lamps. He wasn't tall enough to do it, really, but he had quite a long stick, which burned at one end. Then two roaring shadows came in quick succession—then sunlight. Beauling looked up at the judge, and found that the judge was looking down at him. He smiled reassuringly at the judge. The judge turned hastily away, and began to fold up his paper.

And now there came a shadow almost as big as night. And the people by open windows shut them, for fear the shadow would reach in and grab their hats. The shadow was long and black and roaring, but every so often he had a sun-colored

-53

band around him, and you could see that he was made of bricks. After a long time the shadow began to slow up, and presently there was sunlight again—a place full of engines, a noise of many people—then a cool, darkish house, with the front wall gone, closed over them, and they got out on a long sidewalk. It stretched away ever so far, and stopped when it came to a lot of people who leaned against a rope to keep from falling.

Then there was a walk through many streets, all of which looked familiar, and finally they came to a vast house of red bricks, which had a long flight of steps leading to a closed door with a funny little picket-gate in the middle of it. Over the door was a curved green board, with gold letters on it. Little Beauling looked up and up at the great face of the house. In one of the windows he saw the face of a child that looked out and out. In another window he saw the end of an iron bed, and one corner of a pillow.

It was hot and stuffy in the train. Judge Tyler thought. It had been cool

-54

and delicious in the village. The sun came at such an angle through the window that it was difficult to read the paper. He thought of his pleasant study, with its controllable lights. The trip was long and dusty. He had made it often before; nothing was new or interesting. He vowed he would never make it again. There were too many people in the streets. They hurried by in all directions, with white faces and nervous steps. The people at Mitf ord had color in their cheeks. He saw many little boys with faces as old and hard as the faces of men. He looked down at the rosy boy at his side. How soon the cheeks would pale, and the little face grow troubled! He thought of his own childhood, the daisies and the meadow through which the trout brook streamed, the shady woods, the gentle cows that gave him milk, the sounds of the birds in the morning. Judge Tyler looked up and up at the great face of the house. And at one of the windows he saw the face of a child that looked out and out.
{{nop}}

-55

Tom Beauling looked up at the judge, and saw that the judge was looking down at him. How bright the eyes of the judge!

They went up the steps, hand in hand, very slowly, for little Beauling had to get both feet on a given step before he could negotiate the next. This he always did with his right foot.

Half way up the flight they stopped. The judge was reading the gold letters on the green board:
{{dhr}}
{{c|{{asc|Orphan Asylum}}}}
{{dhr}}
{{sc|Little Beauling}} felt the hand that was holding his own tighten. Then he felt himself snatched into the air by a strong arm, and he heard a hoarse voice crying, "Let's get out of this, Tom!" Judge Tyler, with little Beauling in his arms, ran down the steps of the orphan asylum like one fleeing from justice.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|They}} had delicious things to eat off of a marble counter. You sat on a high

-56

chair that had only one leg, but wouldn't upset. The things to eat were under little glass domes with little glass knobs on top. There was a big silver thing that hissed like an engine, and gave out tea, coffee, or soup. All that you had to do was to point at what you wanted, and a lady gave it to you as quickly as she possibly could. One lady was not so busy as the others. She sat behind a desk, and took all the money that people gave her. But she seemed to like the judge better than the other people, because after he had wiped his lips with a napkin and given her a green money, she smiled pleasantly and gave him back eight green moneys and two silver moneys of different sizes and three little brown moneys. And she nodded pleasantly at Beauling, and said to the judge: "Your grandson?"

"My son," said the judge, in a gruff voice.

-57

{{di|A}}BOUT this time it began to be noticed by his friends that Judge Tyler would give up without a struggle any question which might arise between his avowed intentions and the dictates of his heart. But this was without weakness, for his heart was no longer his own. True, it continued to beat within his dignified frame, but no longer with the tap of habit and education; it fluttered in airy flights, like the heart of a mother chicken, looked at bank accounts through glasses that magnified, and saw in all the world but one treasure, its master and its adopted son—Tomas Beauling, ætat five.

Judge Tyler rearranged portions of his house, became a student of sweets, a patron of toy-shops, and a master of Mother Goose. He bent his mind to teach, as gently as possible, a little boy how to

-58

read; he burned his fingers over a toysteam-engine, and learned to play marbles. He forced his fingers and point of view, and educated them backward. He shot peas out of spring-cannon, and decimated regiments of lead soldiers. When the hot weather came, he scuttled off to a seaside place of Maine, taking with him as companion and playmate a little boy who wore snow-white sailor suits, and, as nurse and protector for them both, an ancient Irish cook who had turned her seventieth year, but who laughed at steps and was by turns lenient and stem with children of sixty or of five.

In short, Judge Tyler plunged into mental everglades, and came upon the Fountain of Youth, whose waters are of three parts—enthusiasm, faith, and selfsacrifice. The deeper he drank, the greater his reward.

Tomas Beauling was in a fair way to be spoiled. It had not the slightest effect. Mischievous he was and prankish, but obedient as the day is long, never out of temper, frank and loyal. Indeed, he

-59

was such a good child that it was to be feared he would die young. But it would have to be by sudden dispensation of the gods, for he was the sturdiest youngster between two seas. He never wore out a suit of clothes, but outgrew as many as could be got for him; he never broke things by accident, but by design. He was as strong as a bear cub.

At fourteen he was as big as Judge Tyler, ridiculous as it may seem, for the judge was no pygmy—a lank, loosejointed young creature, with fine, tawny coloring, challenging eyes, a straight, thick nose with wide nostrils, a strong, round head covered with short, tawny hair, and hands and feet of enormous size. It was to be hoped that he would grow up to his hands and feet. A time came when they looked somewhat small for the rest of him. As a young and vivid force that might one day develop into symmetry and management of self, he was a charm to the speculating eye. But of finished beauty he had only two features—the eyes, big, bold, and gray, and the big,

-60

sweet mouth. This had come to him from his mother. One end of it, cut a little higher than the other, gave him an expression, even when angry, of amused tolerance. The other end was grave. His chin came out at you a little, and had the central cleft that so often goes with generous natures. His general expression was one of great sweetness of temper. On the whole, though, lie was nothing but an immense, powerful, clumsy puppy to look at. You had to be interested to pick out his good points.

At this time his voice changed suddenly from the treble of a child to a shaking bass. For a month or more it would rumble deeply, break, and go off in a high squeak. Then it settled—deep, rumbling, and voluminous. He became full of songs, and let them out so loudly that houses were shaken. Judge Tyler loved to hear him sing. A prim little old lady, with a tight curl on each side of her face, taught him his notes, and made him master of many "albums." He knew all the good old songs from the "{{lps|link=Lyke Wake Dirge|pre=Lyke Wake|post=Dirge}}

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{{lpe|link=Lyke Wake Dirge|pre=Lyke Wake|post=Dirge}}" to "[[The Girl I Left Behind Me|The Girl I {{SIC|left|Left}} Behind Me]]." They said in the village it was a pity Judge Tyler set so much on Tom Beauling's voice, as it would end by making the boy uppish. This was a mistake; praise was water to the duck's back. He sang only because he loved to sing. Of an evening, the judge would lay down his book and say:

"Tommy, let's have the '[[The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond|High Road]].' It was the judge's favorite song. Instantly the head would tip back, the big, sweet mouth open, and a sweet, tremendous roar come out:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
"Oh ye'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye—"
}}

{{sc|As}} he grew older, Tommy learned to control his voice and give people strange emotions. He learned this all of a sudden. He came in one night, very tired, and sang "[[The Low-backed Car]]" softly, under his breath, as it were, and when he looked up Judge Tyler and the doctor

-62

had tears in their eyes. It was presumable that neither had ever sat with his arm around Peggy's waist as he rode in the low-backed car.

By reading, his mind was antique, and, by sympathy, adventurous. He was stocked to the brim with Bohn's translations from the heroically geniused Greeks and Romans. Old Homer chanted to him of the great human demigods; old Xenophon told him of wily commanders; Virgil, of a city founded in a strange land far from the walls of the fathers. He was crammed with Oliver and Roland and the peers of France; Roucesvalles, and the deed that was done there; the sublime deaths in the forefront of the battle; old Turpin, the life pouring from his side, giving extreme unction to the dying; Roland and Durandal and the wail of the Oliphans that reached Charlemagne and called him back. He was with Siegfried through the smoke of the burning mountain. He forged many an irresistible sword on his mental anvil. Bayard, who feared none

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and whom none could reproach, was his friend; Alexander and the horse Bucephalus. But best was that gentle robber Robin Hood, the not impossible Galahad, and the sinner Launcelot. And closer perhaps, more historical, though no more human, Drake, Hawkins, Grenville, and All the gentlemen adventurers.

"If he doesn't spend his life in an office because he gets an idea that he ought to," said Judge Tyler to the doctor, "he'll discover a continent and build a city where the first spotted cow he sees lies down, fight every one in sight, and make periodic trips to Hades to talk it over with his old friends."

There was some truth in that.

The years were good to Tom Beauling under his friend's kind roof. People spoke of them not as a man and his adopted son who had turned out well, but as Damon and Pythias. The evening years of the one and the dawning years of the other were not a separation but a bond. Of the stock in the gigantic trust Life, the one was short and the other was

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long (though, to split hairs, we are all short); but, as is proper between comrades, Beauling did not feel superior because he had been born late in the century, nor was Judge Tyler envious because he had been born earlier therein. For better dividends than are declared to most were declared to both of them. And they spent a large joint income of affection and unselfishness. They were great friends.

Judge Tyler was white and old, but he stood erect and walked firmly. He boasted a stride as long as Beauling's, prided himself on unshaken strength, pretended that he did not sleep for an hour every afternoon—and Beauling was very gentie with the old man. The doctor across the way had gone to join his less fortunate patients. And old Ann, the cook, feminine to the last, had gone to her old home in Kilkenny, forsaking ease and plenty and the associations of fifty years that she might look once more and behold through filmy eyes the days of her youth, the hovel where she was

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born, the potato field, and the grave o' her father.

Soon after Beauling's coining to the village, Dorothy, with her two children and husband, did move to a more lucrative town in Illinois. And no more about them.

-66

{{di|T}}OM BEAULING was in his eighteenth year when it came time for Judge Tyler to die. The winter went out with three days of wind and wet snow, and on the second of those days the cold got into the old gentleman's bones, and he took to his bed. On the third day he was bright and feverish by turns. On the fourth day he talked for a long time behind closed doors with the new doctor, and learned what it was best for him to know. When the doctor was gone, he called upon them to open his windows wide and let in the spring.

Tom Beauling sat by the bedside of his good friend. His mind was innocent as to the change that was coming.

"Tommie," said the judge, "when I am up and about, you and I are just like

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boys together, aren't we? Just as caiv less and light-hearted as so many boys. But I've been thinking that some day we must have a serious talk about this and that. And what could be a better time than now? Here am I, comfortable in bed; there are you, comfortable in that chair. What do you say to having it out now?"

"Yes, sir," said Tommie.

Judge Tyler drew a deep breath. Then he thrust under the pillow, and came out with an old, faded photograph. He held it face down across his knee, and Tommie noticed that the stained, yellow back sported a gryphon's head, gilt, and, written across one corner in violet ink, his own name. He himself drew something of a long breath. The photograph promised an answer to certain questions.

"About your name, Tommie," said the judge; "did you ever wonder why you were called Beauling, and not Tyler after me?"

"Yes, sir," said Tommie, "I have wondered."
{{nop}}

-68

"M-m-m!" said the judge.

"I think I know a little, sir," said Tommie, "but I thought you would not like me to ask you if it was true or not."

"What do you know, Tommie?" asked the judge. "What have you heard?"

It was very hard for the boy to say it.

"I heard that I wasn't anybody," he said slowly. "Somebody tried to joke me about it—and since then nobody has felt like saying anything about it."

Judge Tyler was unable to suppress a grim chuckle. Then he said gravely: "To me you've been everything, Tommie—just everything."

"Never mind the rest, then," said Beauling; "it doesn't matter. I've always sort of known that I had no—that my mother wasn't married."

"And you never told me, Tommie?"

"Well, I thought it over, sir, and lay awake nights and felt bad about it, and then it struck me that I'd better feel bad about the things that were my fault, and not bother about the things that were other people's faults."
{{nop}}

-69

"I might have known you would take it that way," said Judge Tyler, his eyes full of love and pride. "I might have known it."

"Yes, sir," said Tommie.

Judge Tyler handed him the photograph.

"That is your father and your mother," he said. "Tommie," he said, "if ever you meet your father, you tell him that an old man was made happy by his sin."

Tommie looked at the photograph during an interval that was neither short nor long. Then, with a little gulp, he knelt by the judge and threw his arms about him.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|"Tommie,}} sometime I will have to go and leave you. You're down in my will for everything I've got. It isn't much, but you need never want for most things. I'll hate to go and leave you, Tommie. What are you going to do with your life—boy?"

"What do you want me to do—father?"
{{nop}}

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The father turned his head to the wall, and whimpered for the joy of the naming. After a long time he said:

"My son, if you are to be what I want you to be, you will be a good man and a gentleman. Little else counts. Tom Beauling, after whom you are named, was a man who wanted to marry your mother when she was in great distress. He is dead now. He was a failure, I believe. But I take it that he was a good man and a gentleman. Be like that. Honorable in great matters and minute, a friend to those who need friends. And be clean. I"—the judge spoke almost bashfully—"am an old man, but I have come through as innocent as the day I was born. I am proud of you, Tommie; but I'm prouder of that. Go about the world, and the sea—friendly and honest—and some day, because you are a son of old earth, you will find the port where you would be, and there heave your pyramid. Make the world a little better for your presence in it. That's what I want you to do." The old gentleman smiled cunningly. "Tommie," he said, "I've

-71

been reading your favorite books behind your back, so as not to be behindhand. Listen. 'Thou, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight's hand.' Go on, Tommie."

Tommie, his voice faltering a little, took up the great threnody.

{{" '}}And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield.{{' "}}

Then the judge:

{{" '}}And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse.{{' "}}

And again, Tommie:

{{" '}}And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman.{{' "}}

{{" '}}And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword.{{' "}}

{{" '}}And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights.{{' "}}

They spoke in hushed voices, as if saying a litany.

{{" '}}And thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies.{{' "}}

{{" '}}And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest{{' "}}
{{nop}}

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They did not speak for some time, but looked out of the window at the spring.

"Be like that, Tommie," said the judge.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|Toward}} evening Judge Tyler became feverish, and went out of his head a little, and needed the doctor. That passed. The room became dark.

"Shall I light up, sir?"

"No, Tommie, don't. I can see you."

There was a weakening in the judge's voice. After a period, he raised suddenly on his elbow.

"Tommie," he said, "I want to hear '[[Glenlogie]]' again."

"Whenever you like, sir," said Tommie.

"Whenever—I—like," said the judge to himself. "O Lord!"

Tommie thrust up his chin and sang:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
"Three score o' nobles rade to the king's ha',
But bonnie Glenlogie's the flower o' them a';
Wi' his milk white steed and his bonnie black e'e
:Glenlogie, dear mither, Glenlogie for me."
}}

-73

The big, joyous voice filled the room, and went rumbling out into the dark. The judge tapped out the time with thin fingers. His gray face brightened and nodded to the tune.

"I want to hear more this night," he said when "Glenlogie" was ended.

"What one?"

The judge did not answer, but lay back with closed eyes.

"What one, sir?"

{{" '}}[[Mally O|Mally O, Mally O]]!{{' "}} cried the judge, starting up.

Tommie sang.

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}Will ye go to Flanders, my Mally O?
Will ye go to Flanders, my bonnie Mally O?
:Then we'll get wine and brandy,
:And sack and sugar candy;
Will ye go to Flanders, my Mally O?"
}}

Tom began the next verse:

He did not know that his old friend was listening to "Mally O" for the last

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time, but somehow—somehow he gulped, and had to begin again:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}Will ye go to Flanders, my Mally O?
And see the chief commanders, my Mally O?
:You'll see the bullets fly,
:And the soldiers how they—[gulp]—die,
And the ladies how they cry, my Mally O."
}}

"It's so good, Tommie—another, Tommie—{{lang|la|''tempus fugit''}}—the ''best."''

Tommie smiled at the old man, and lifting his voice, sweet and airy, sang:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
"By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lo-mond;
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lo-mond.
:Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road.
:And I'll be in Scotland afore ye:
:But me and my true love, we'll never meet again
:On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lo-mond."
}}

-75

"Louder, Tommie, louder. "The voice swelled brave and loud. Tommie could hear the judge feebly tapping the time on the sheets.

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm|pad=yes}}'T was there that we parted in yon shady glen
On the steep, steep side o' Ben Lo-mond,
Where in purple hue—the highland hills we view,
And the moon comin' out in the gloaming."
}}

Tommie was conscious that the tapping had ceased. He quickened into the refrain:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye—"
}}

Faster, Tommie,—{{lang|la|''tempus fugit.''}}

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}But me and my true love, we'll never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lo-mond."
}}

There is another verse, Tommie, but you need not trouble to sing it.

—76

-77

—78

-79

{{di|T}}HE Peninsular and Oriental single-screw, warranted not to make over ten knots an hour, old-type (by the saloon aft) steamship ''Rohilla'' lay in the crater-like basin of Hong-Kong harbor, with three feet of her sheathing out forward and a foot of it out aft. Two yellow-white awninged launches, fat as grub-worms in the bows, smelled at her starboard side. The ''Rohilla'' was taking in, with grunts and crashes, the perishable freight for Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. The harbor swarmed with evilsmelling junks and sampans. War-ships of France, England, Germany, and Russia, compact as watches, of dirtied colors but extreme cleanliness and threatening design, rode in the harbor, and rose above the huddling junks as unfeelingly as rob-

-80

ber castles stand above villages on the Rhine. Far up the harbor, by the dry-docks, a mud-colored raft, pointed at both ends, supported two squat, mud-colored turrets and a giddy flag, much too big for it, that was just beginning to be known and feared in the far East. The French, English, German, and Russian war-ships were there on a hurry call, because it seemed that some one was threatening some one else's sphere of influence, and the four capitals of China (which are Paris, London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg) wanted to find out whose sphere of influence it was that was being threatened, why it was being threatened, and by whom. After that England would stick her jaw into Eussia's face, and her elbow into Germany's ribs. Germany would hit out a scheme for announcing universal peace from the top of the Mount of Olives; Eussia would catch a yellow statesman by the pig-tail and make him dance, and France woidd either plan a noble revenge for herself or jump up and down, clap her hands, and say:
{{nop}}

-81

"{{lang|fr|C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.}}"

The mud-colored raft with the twin turrets was the only vessel there which meant business. There was fighting in the Philippines, and she was going to get back to it just as soon as the weeds could be scraped off her; and after that she had an ambitious design of finding, all by herself, some island that nobody wanted, calling the inhabitants rebels (for the benefit of the press at home), and afterward annexing them to the United States in the interest of the Republican candidate for President, with much destruction of seaboard villages and a decimation of the native population.

A sick white man dragged himself out of the ''Rohilla's'' smoking-room—an isolated dog-kennel aft, ornamented by two potted palms, a photograph of a famous Japanese actor, and a colored photograph of an infamous geisha—supported himself by two anemic-looking hands against the rail, and took in the prospect through eyes whose whites were yellow, and which could not open to their full

-82

because of the dull pain in the man's head. The man had a shrewd, whimsical face, and was clothed from neck to heel in snow-white linen made up by a real tailor. The breast pockets of his coat bulged with cigars. The little finger of his left hand was circled by a plain gold seal-ring, with a coat of arms cut into the oval. Originally the ring had fitted the finger; now only the bones of the knuckle kept it on. The man looked at the clean, leafy city of Hong-Kong for some moments, then traveled his eyes over the grim cliffs above it, then over the warships in the harbor, rested them for a moment on the red, white, and blue flag of his country, and shut them tight. Then he drew the back of his hand across them, opened them, and said to the view:

"There's a fine big city, and back of it's a fine big country, about five times as rich as the State of Pennsylvania, inhabited by four hundred million people who would consider me vulgar; in front of it is one of the finest harbors in the world, filled with war-ships belonging to

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four world powers—pardon me, ''five." ''He turned to wink at the distant Stars and Stripes. "No; filled with ''a'' war-ship belonging to ''a'' world power, and many war-ships belonging to four harpies. When I think that there may be a big war, with thousands of men killed and blown to pieces, why it gives me food for reflection. And when I think that one man from Ohio and one man from New York and one man from Pennsylvania—that's me—could buy the whole damned thing and declare dividends on it—why, that's food for laughter; but when I think that it'll be a whole month or more before I can buy a good piece of beefsteak—why, that's food for tears."

The man embraced all those regions lying to the west with a wave of the hand. With the other hand he felt of his ribs.

"Never again," said he, and he hummed from the "Pilot Boy":

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}And ''then'' the little pilot boy
:He felt the wonder of the sea:
'It's either liquid hell,' he said,
:'Or kingdom come,' said he."
}}

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A launch, sporting the colors of the Hong-Kong Yacht Club, coughed alongside, and stopped within hailing distance. A man with a chest like the bastion of a fortification towered in the bows, and, opening his mouth, began to speak. At that moment another launch, bearing the imperial flag of China, shot out of a slip, clove through a village of sampans, and made for the Russian flag-ship. All the ships in the harbor raised their whistles on high, and presently the Russian flagship ran out a gun and commenced an interminable salute. The din was awful. And all the noise was because one ordinary man who happened to be a viceroy was going to take lunch with another ordinary man who happened to be an admiral.

The man in the bows of the yacht-club launch continued to speak, and, in spite of the screaming whistles and the booming guns, what he said was perfectly audible to the sick man leaning over the rail of the ''Rohilla.''

"You are Mr. Wareing, of course," he

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said. "I was up country when your note came, and that's why you're thinking I'm rude. I'm afraid you've had an awfully dull time of it. You see, there was a big flight of snipe, and I simply had to go after them. Come ashore now, and we'll do some lunch." The whistles suddenly stopped, and the man's voice rang like a trumpet in the abrupt stillness. Wareing laughed.

"All right," he called. "Good for you! Shall I jump, or will you come alongside?"

The man in the launch laughed, and gave an order. The launch churned water aft, and sidled in to the ''Rohilla.''

"So that's a magnate out for pleasure," mused the man in the launch. "Wareing of Pennsylvania—the Grand Mogul of Pennsylvania. He looks like a ghost getting over jungle fever."

"So that's the man who went through from Canton to Su-Chow, and knows about the coal-fields of Shen-se," said Wareing of Pennsylvania, as he came over the side.
{{nop}}

-86

He saw his slim, sickly hand disappear into a hand made of brown steel.

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Wareing."

"I've come a long way for the pleasure, Mr. Beauling."

The launch lurched forward, and then ran steadily in the direction of the yacht-club pier.

-87

{{di|T}}HERE followed a week which Wareing of Pennsylvania never forgot. It began with a pepper-pot. This dish, he learned, made the sick strong, and was to be had at its best in only three privileged places—the Yacht Club of Hong-Kong, the island of Barbados, and the Westchester Country Club of Westchester, New York. It continued amid a whirl of young men who received incomes of from twelve hundred to two thousand dollars a year and kept establishments with quantities of servants, played polo on ponies that came up from Australia for no other purpose, never walked except in the house, drank drinks called pegs, which were made of whisky and soda and did not go to their heads for a long time, and performed the various

-88

functions of their various callings between nine o'clock of one morning and eleven-thirty of the same. The week went on with a night trip through darkest Canton, where a million people live in boats in a river, and push into the water between them the people they do not like. There were rickshaw and horseback rides in the moonlight. A dinner for the Chamber of Commerce, at which the English merchants opened their mouths to talk and said nothing, and Chinese merchants opened their mouths to eat and spoke volumes. It was a whirl of a week, out of which incidents stood only by recollection. Wareing remembered shops where the sunlight struck on old bronze; dark alleys that closed suddenly with gates of yellow, grim faces; temples full of bestialized devils, and little children who embroidered like angels. But what stood forever vividest in Wareing's mind was the recollection of a gentle, towering man, with a big, sweet mouth, who went through it all at his side—a man who laughed

-89

with a pure heart, who sang songs so plaintively that you cried, or so splendidly that martial shivers jumped along your spine, or so loudly that the roof complained.

A man who took ''him''—Qriswold B. Wareing, the Grand Mogul of Pennsylvania-under his wing, instructed him with strange fables, and would not let him pay for as much as a chop-stick. He had become conscious'without being told, that the huge, graceful young man had seen most of the things worth seeing, done most of the things worth doing, sat at meat with princes and ridden their elephants for them, and was withal as simple and communicative as a child and as debonair as the seraphim. "He is the Lord's anointed," wrote Griswold B. Wareing to his son and heir. "And thou shalt go and do likewise."

Beauling took him one day to lunch with some friends of his in a little house on the hill. There were a man and his wife and their children five.

Over the gate of the house was gilded:

-90

{{c|{{asc|Bleak House}}}}
{{dhr}}
{{sc|The}} house was cold brown, in a garden of gravel, and looked down a drop of cliff. Beyond and below was Hong-Kong, green and white, the blue harbor and the many-colored ships. "It is one of the places I like to call home," Beauling said affectionately; "we'll see why."

Wareing saw. The door flew open, and out flew children. They seized Beauling by the hands and knees, and were swung squeaking into the air and kissed. They yowled with delight. Behind them, smiling, were their young father and mother.

Within the bleak house were warm hearts, poverty that was not ashamed—and Griswold B. Wareing thought that he understood.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|There}} were times during that week when long and serious pow-wows were held by Griswold B. Wareing, who could float a national loan, and Tomas Beauling, who had jollied his way through yellowest China and beheld the coal-fields of Shen{{peh}}

-91

se. The pow-wows were of coal—coal—coal, and how to get it. Wareing drew a pencil across a map, from a port of the sea to an ancient city of the interior, and, "So the road should nin," he said. "Loop it to the left," said Beauling, "for the iron." And they so talked, schemed, planned, and entered into mutual confidence that at the week's end they smelled action.

"It will take years to put the road through," said Wareing; "but that's my business. I came out here for pleasure and big game. I've got sick of the latter and precious little of the former, so I think I will run up to Pekin and do a little plain business with his Imperial Majesty, and persuade him to let me open up his empire for him. That road will cost so many"—he opened and shut his hands rapidly a number of times—"millions to build, but we will buy up the land at the terminals, coin money that way, get the powers hitched, and pour a stream of coal-black coal a thousand miles long and as big round as a freight{{peh}}

-92

car into the holds of their war-ships. And you, Beauling, do you realize that when the road is through, I have picked on you, young man, to be the whole song and dance up at the other end? You're a daisy, Beauling." (It may be remembered that Griswold B. Wareing was in the East for pleasure, and that this conversation took place on the veranda of the Hong-Kong Yacht Club. Enough said. The next day he was sober, but took back nothing.) "You're one of the finest young men I've ever met, and you're cut out to be the Oriental representative of the only absolutely unique and original old King Cole—that's me. But what do you know about coal, Beauling?"

"It all goes up into smoke, doesn't it?" said Beauling.

"That's right—joke about a man's pet plan, Tonmiie. But listen. I've made letters for you to take to various people that"—the original old King Cole threw out his thin chest—"belong to me. These people live in Pennsylvania, and do the coal trick. Now, while I go up to

-93

Pekin and hobnob with Majesty—I don't know but you would do that part better, but I want to try it on— Boy, get two pegs—you're to go home—"

"Home?" said Beauling.

"Home with the letters, and the people they are to will take you in hand and put you through the mines and through the mines and through the mines until you've learned to be over one of the mines, and you will put your mind on the mines; and after you've learned and learned and learned, you'll blow back here and up to Shen-se and be the new Emperor of China. The present one is yellow, and the next one's going to be black. Will you do it, Tommie?"

Tonmoie smiled an embracing smile. "If he means it, I will," he said to himself. "Not because I want to be the coalblack Emperor of China particularly, but because it's something I've never done before." And aloud he said: "If you make me that offer to-morrow morning in time for me to catch the boat for Yokohama, I will accept."
{{nop}}

-94

"Bully for you!" said Wareing.

Here a number of young men came to drag Wareing and Beauling off to dinner. It was Wareing's last night, and they made it hum.

Toward morning they threatened to make a breach in the huge Beauling by siphon fire unless he would sing for them. And he, nothing loath, sent forth a roaring voice to greet the dawn.

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}And now the king he looked about,
:{{fqm|'}}And I will choose,' said he,
{{fqm|'}}The loveliest in all the world
:To be my queen to me.

{{fqm|{{" '}}}}And you, Sir Quentin and Sir Miles,
:And you, Sir Barbaree,
Shall seek her in the doucest ship
:That swims upon the sea.

{{fqm|{{" '}}}}And you, Lord Marvin and Lord Kay,
Shall say this word for me . . .{{' "}}
}}

Dawn broke into gold. And before the sun had set Tomas Beauling was on

-95

board the P. & O. S. S. ''Rohilla,'' lifting across the Yellow Sea to Japan.

And for years afterward the young men of Hong-Kong were wont to boast that they had once been drunk with Griswold B. Wareing of Pennsylvania.

-96

{{di|I}}F one of the ancient proprietors of the regions about Manhattan—say Wanacapeen or Taquamarke or Awarazawis or Longe Classe or Kneed—could rise from under his particular heap of clam- and oyster-shells and walk again, it would do his savage heart good to come upon the estate of John Dunbar, Esq.; for if he confined his regards to its edges and shores, and did not foolishly penetrate—foolishly, from his point of view—to the house and gardens, he would recognize his own dear woodlands, left to forest themselves since the year one, the shaggy hickory from which he cut the bow, the sassafras from which he stole the succulent root, and the weedy, rocky beach where the fiddler-crabs scuttle and the clams spurt, from which he launched

-97

the jolly canoe upon the happy fishingwaters of Pelham Bay. The rich saloonkeeper, who drives his fast horse out of town to City Island of a Sunday; the man who scorches thither with his best girl upon the same blessed occasion, and the father of the family—eleven, to one horse, with lunch in paper bags—who similarly spends his day of rest, all know that the enchanting forest, held in bounds by a low stone wall, on the right, just after you cross Pelham bridge—Pelham bridge is falling down!—is the mile-thick screen to the private life of that great financier.

The house itself rose two hundred years ago, in the time of the first Dunbar, on the hill within the forest, and was paid for in the skins of the beaver. Anon, as it became loved of the family, it grew and put out wings and ball-rooms and halls, and became great. Around it are gardens of flowers and strawberries, lawns, and huge, single trees. The house is overrun with pipe-vines and roses. There is one wing to accommodate twenty

-98

bachelors, and as many shower-baths. There are three pianos, so far apart that pieces thundered upon each at the same time will not collide. There are forty horses in the stable, and in the bay a yacht whose business it is to take Mr. Dunbar to his Wall-street office every morning and home every night.

One Sunday in June, the impressively rich Mr. Dunbar, in perfect clothes, sat on his high horse Lotus, and talked over the top of a box hedge to a beautiful lady in a white dress, who was up to her knees in cut roses and was working further havoc with a pair of bright scissors. The lady was tall and slender. She looked about twenty-eight. As a matter of fact, she had been for twenty years the wife of the tall, careworn man on the horse, and had borne him two sons and two daughters, one of the daughters being herself married. Dunbar's face had finance and success written upon it in deep, grim lines. His hair was thin, but not yet gray; his mustache, half white; his expression, set and tired. Only his eyes{{peh|—}}

-99

for they twinkled when he spoke to people he liked—showed that life was still worth living.

"Is this Mr. Beauling coming?" said the lady.

"He will be in for lunch," said Dunbar. "He's visiting at New Rochelle, and telephones that he will ride down."

"Who is he?" said Mrs. Dunbar. "Wareing's letter was so absurd and biblical"—she cut through the waxy green stem of a yellow rose—"that I really couldn't get the drift."

"Wareing—steady, boy!—was going to make him something in China, I believe," said Dunbar; "president of some rich coal—mines that he was going to build a line to. The scheme, it seems, was rather visionary even for Wareing, and fell through. That's all I know. I suppose he felt sorry to have to disappoint Beauling, and is trying to give him a good time."

"But why pick on us particularly?" said Mrs. Dunbar.

"Well, Wareing is a very old friend;

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and, after all, it is not much trouble. We "can afford to be polite," he added whimsically.

The rose-garden, with its lofty box hedge, lay close to the spot where the driveway came out of the woods.

"Listen," said Mrs. Dunbar.

A sound came faintly through the trees of the dactylic measure of a horse cantering, and a beautiful, deep voice raised in song. The sounds grew louder, and occasionally a word was distinguishable out of the notes of the song.

"What a voice!" said Mrs. Dunbar, and she listened raptly.

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}And—the—⏑counselors
:Of—and proud degree,
Said, 'Gracious king,⏑—⏑—,
:Our gracious queen to be.{{' "}}
}}

Then all the words came out clearly and pridefully.

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}And now the king he looked about.
:'And I will choose,' said he,
{{fqm|'}}The loveliest in all the world
:To be my queen to me.{{' "}}
}}

-101

And then the man who was doing the singing, and the horse that was carrying the man, emerged suddenly from among the trees and halted, the horse through compulsion and the man through confusion. Mrs. Dunbar thought that she had never seen so handsome a man or so big.

"I beg your pardon," said the man, "but those woods were so beautiful that I thought they would last forever, and I didn't know I was anywhere near anybody. I hope that you didn't think that I was a whole carriageful of loafers with a beer-keg. You see," he said, "I love to sing, and sometimes I can't help doing it." Then the man blushed very becomingly.

"I just talk along," he said, "and leave out the whole point of everything. My name is Beauling, and I think—I mean I hope—you are expecting me to lunch."

Mr. Dunbar put his heels into Lotus, rode up to Beauling, and shook hands with him, liking him at once.

"Of course we're expecting you, Mr. Beauling," he said; "and the manner in

-102

which you came was really a great privilege to us. It sounded beautiful."

Mrs. Dunbar smiled over the top of the hedge.

"I can't shake hands." she said, "but I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Beauling; and if you men wish to be very useful you can each take an armful of roses for me."

Sheaves of roses were passed over the hedge, and the gentlemen took them in their arms.

"You can take them up to the house," said Mrs. Dunbar, "and make yourselves clean and beautiful for lunch."

They rode up to the house, gave the horses to one man, the roses to another, and went in. They made ready for lunch.

It was served on a thick, dark, straightgrained, dully shining mahogany, in a huge room that had French windows to the floor along one side, and smelled of roses. There was one mighty sideboard rich with plate, and another that was a foam of chiseled glass. Three men-servants waited. The table was laid for four.
{{nop}}

-103

"My sons," explained Mrs. Dnnbar, "are having examinations up at New Haven, and my daughter Phylis"—with a deprecating look at the vacant place—"is ''always'' late."

"Phylis is not the youngest," said Dnnbar, affectionately, "but she is the most spoiled."

A white apparition that sparkled sailed into the room.

A clear, low voice said something about not getting up. The gentlemen rose. And the heart of Beauling began to thump as if he had been smoking too much.

"Who was singing in the woods?" said the voice. "Was it you, papa, gifted suddenly from above, or was it the great god Pan?"

"It was I," said Beauling, timidly.

"I liked it so," said the apparition, and she turned full upon the dauntless Beauling,—who, skulking in the shadow which the fates had suddenly cast over him, was fixedly regarding his plate,—and hummed mockingly:

-104

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}And now the king he looked about.
:'And I will choose,' said he,
{{fqm|'}}The loveliest in all the world
:To be my queen to me.{{' "}}
}}

"My dear Phylis," said Mrs. Dunbar, "I won't allow you to hum at table."

Tom Beauling looked up from his plate, and saw that the white apparition which sparkled was, as he had half supposed, a maiden.

-105

''My dear Phylis:'' Picture to yourself the positively firework succession of events and regrets in the last few days. I received sailing orders—I like to pretend that I am in the navy—packed my things, met you, saw you three times in three days, desired greatly that my ship go without me, said "Good-by" to you, answered your absurd note, by so doing missed my ship, caught her in a tug-boat—at a vast outlay of capital, which you must repay me by a real letter—and here I am in a lifting corner of the smoking-room, listening to the bone being ground in the teeth of the ship, the slap of the water alongside, smelling salt—do you know the smell of apples in autumn and the smell of salt at sea move my heart like bugle-calls?—and picturing to myself your great, cool house, the wide verandas, the shady trees, the bowl of roses on the dining-table, the alarums and ex-

-106

cursions of servants, the discipline of order which passes all understanding. Truly, your lady mother is the genius of housekeeping, and how easily she does it! And your father, that wise swayer of finance, how easily he pays the bills! I liked you all; the actualities of those present and the shadows—no, that is a somber word—the presences of those absent. Did you like me? I should love you to. Did you? No—not ''did'' you, but ''do'' you? And is it because I am a tramp—a do much and accomplish nothing—on the face of everything? I came to you from a black coal—mine; I left you—because I had to—for a bright beach of palms. To me, when I was little, that sort of thing used to shed halos of luminous romance around the heads of the people that did it—no matter how big the heads, or how little was in them—but it doesn't now. How black the coal—mine! How weary the beach of palms! But I believe in the bottom of my heart that you liked me. I am going to go through

-107

life pretending that you did, anyhow; and if you are a perfect lady, you must never tell me the contrary.

How shall I thank you for being so good to me in your great, cool house on the hillf And those strawberries in the full, fair garden! Verily, they were good to' me, and cruelly did I eat of them. Will you give my love to the Greuze in the library, to the chiseled glass on the sideboard, and to the stranger that is without your gate? Is there one at present? And how I envy him! I was the last Did he come as I came, bearing letters to your father from the Great Mogul of Pennsylvania? Or did he come shining from fairyland, with the accoutrements of a prince? You must tell me when such an one comes, that I may ''felicite'' you.

We are going through fog now, and every minute we bellow hoarsely, as the ocean animals of one of those ages that end in "oic" must have bellowed. It is rank cold, and there are no strawberries.

-108

But long live the gods! And longest live Oceanus, son of Gaea. But of goddesses, may Phylis live the longest!
{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}} salutes her.}}
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' Much have I walked silent by the shores of the loud-resounding sea, revolving your father, the prodigious payer of bills, in my stout heart. A draft has not come, and my divers are clamoring for their pay. We are back from the fishing-grounds, with the smell of the rotting shell still in our nostrils, and many pearls under lock and key. The flower out of decay, out of the oyster the pearl I And if a draft doesn't come I cannot pay my bills, and my pearls will be stolen from me. Some of them are beauties. It is great sport, pearl-fishing—more exciting than whales, because there is a bigger element of greed, and twice as dangerous, for the boats are more fragile and the storms more severe. I went down once, because I dreamed that if I did I should find the most desirable pearl in the ocean. I didn't. They put me in

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the suit and helmet and lowered me—not kicking, for my soles were too heavy with lead, but dreadfully afraid—over the side. Down I went, and down, till I became blind; for it is only the skilled—the blase divers—that can see at real depths; my feet touched bottom—I swear they did, though the men say I was only half way down. My head split right down the middle—it's grown together again, somehow. I yelled with fright, and begged to be taken out. Then I remembered how to signal—or else did it by accident—and up I went, very slowly. Then they got the things off, and I lay about the rest of the day and bled at the nose, and everybody laughed at me.

Man delighteth to speak of himself, and I, delighting therein more than other men, have forgot my troubles. But a steamer toots in the offing and recalls them, for mayhap my draft is on board and my pearls are to remain mine, and perhaps there is a letter from you. Do you know if there were to be only one of the two, and I could choose which—I

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would not choose the draft. Pearls are merely—pearls. I am, dear lady.
{{right|offset=6em|Faithfully yours,}}
{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}}.}}
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' Avicula Meleagrina margaritifera, a lamellibranchiate mollusk of the family Aviculidae. There is a plunge into science for you! And you can look it up in a book to see if it is spelled right, if you like. It stands for pearl-oyster, and the book will go on to say that it is not really an oyster, after all, and the book will tell you many other things besides. But it will not tell you just how rough and ugly is the outside of the shell, just how smooth and beautiful the inside, or just how iridescent and many-colored, from the serenest pink to the flamingest red, or how the oyster, lowest and most exquisitely creative of artisans, fashions the pearl in self-defense, and fashions his house beautiful, because he cannot bear to live in a house ugly. It will not tell you these things, nor even hint at them, for they are facts{{peh|}}

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—and what book of science was ever known to even hint at a fact! Truly, your pearl-oyster is like a strong man with a clean soul—rough without, full fair within. All his days he passeth content in the deep seas, fashioning the beautiful to the glory of nature. And what is his most beautiful work we shall never know, for the most desirable pearl remaineth forever in the sea, and is the missing link that proveth the immortality of the soul.

A junk of Chinamen came out of the east to the beaches while I was there, and these are great enslavers of Sir Oyster, for they do catch him and put him in a tank and within his house a thin metal image of Buddha. This Sir Oyster, in his anguish, fasteneth to his shell and spreadeth over with a soft iridescence of pearl, so that he maketh within himself, as it were, a shrine, and great is the promulgation of the faith. These Chinamen are a mysterious and gallant lot—you should see their compass, horrific. with dragons and unsportsmanlike de-

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vices—speaking no man's language and 'going masterfully about their business. The yellow brown of them where the sun has struck is great color, and their voices—''blok-tok-chok''—sound like little hammers beating on metal that does not resound. They are up the earliest, and to bed when work is done. Not so my Tamils—alas! they, with other wild crews, made night hideous and wailed in their cups. The beach where we were was six feet deep with shells for miles and miles. Do you wonder? Alexander of Macedon had pearls of these seas. Cleopatra's pearl came from a shell that was rotted on this beach. Hither for thousands of years the fishers have come, hence they have gone, and no fisher abideth long in one stay. And this fisher, Phylis, will have that beach in his nostrils till he does die.

And how am I to thank you for your letter, bringing a peace as of home into this wild life. And you say that I shall always be welcome in the great, cool house on the hill?
{{nop}}

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For the present my face is neither east nor west—the duplicate direction of home—but north to Bombay, for Tomas Beauling is going on a pleasure trip with his well-gotten gains; but then the face will be for home. Sixteen thousand miles! I deride the whole circumference of the globe, let alone a mere segment.

I must carry this to the home mail.
{{right|offset=4em|Always faithfully,}}
{{right|offset=2em|T. B.}}
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' You will perhaps think in your charitable mind that a letter from me to you has been written and has miscarried, and that that is the reason you have not heard for so long a time from your faithful servant. No. I have not written to you for two months, nor have I written to anybody nor known that there was anybody to write to. I have had one of these Eastern fevers—whether jungle or pearl I do not know—which baffle the wise, and must cure itself or not be cured. Well, I seem to be over it, but you wouldn't bow to me if you met me

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in the street—and I dare not describe myself to you. Samson shorn of his locks was not so futile; Laocoön in the folds of the serpents was not so helpless; and Thersites, who was the ugliest man that ever came to Troy, was not so ugly. Alas! what has become of stalwart Beauling? Dear lady, I had to forego Bombay, and come by slow stages up to this hill station of Nuwara Elyia—you say it New-rail-ya—to be in the cool. This is the place where they grow the best tea in the world and make the worst It is a wonderful long valley, thousands of feet above the sea, covered with deep, shiny green tea and bright turf—for there are Englishmen here, and your English civilize with wateringcan and roller—and surrounded by tall hills, bristling with bamboo jungle and dark with keena trees. It was so wonderful coming up! You do it in a rattledy-da train, and at first you go through swamp lands and rice lands and wet green jungles of palm and villages of plantain and other jungles of palm and creepers and flowers. And the

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train climbs and climbs, and little painted posts tell you how high you are, and natives see the train and run after it, and when they have caught up sell you cocoanuts through the window, or ancient Shinhalese coins, and you rock as at sea, and are very hot and give thanks for that there is no dust. You rest at Kandy, rickshaw around the lake under the stars, and listen to the life of the village with one ear and to the life of the jungle with the other. You visit Buddha's tooth in its jeweled caskets—the outer one is of rubies!—and you drive to Peridynia, and for the first time in your life see orchids as are orchids. Again the train, and up you go. And now the thing takes on a bold air of majesty, for you crawl out on precipices and overlook great depths—so green and wet and luxuriant I—vast prospects, green mountains, blue sky, white clouds. There is preached to you many a gospel of space and immortality. Bordering the track are century-plants as big as huts, and sometimes bigger. You pass through the giant fern belt.

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Trees they are of the most delicate shapes, the most springy green. Now there is a waterfall, a pool at the bottom, and a tame elephant np to his eyes in the clean water. His goodwife is on the bank; she shivers and coquettes and daintily tries the temperature with her foot, and says, if he'll excuse her, she really thinks she will not bathe to-day. And of a sudden she gathers herself into an object-lesson of prehistoric dignity, elemental force,—what you will,—strides boldly in, and "What the devil have time, space, heat, and cold to do with me?" says she. And now the elephants are left behind, and away down the hill I behold, with mixed feelings, an ancestor of mine—but not of yours, Phylis! He is in the top of a high tree, hugging himself.

I am writing too longly. But, dear Phylis, I have been through the Valley of the Shadow, and it is so good to be alive again, and cool, and writing to you.

Will you give my regards to your people?
{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}}.}}
{{dhr}}

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''Dear Phylis:'' You will imagine what a long, impatient morning this has been when I tell you that before dawn broke the whole neighborhood, with the exception of your servant, was off after an elk—this is the great Sir Samuel's country—and that he had to lie up and listen for hours to the dogs yapping through the jungle and the men shouting to each other. About breakfast-time (11 {{sc|a.m.}}) the hunt trailed in with a carved elk, and all the dogs that had not been captured by chetahs. Did you ever see a chetah? A tame one—they are never tame—thinks he is a kind of leopard, and has long, thin legs for a body, a bandage across his eyes, two small, round, nervous ears, and a large snarl for a head, and is led by a string. A wild one lives in the jungle, and is a yellow streak full of people's pet dogs. All of which has nothing to do with the impatient morning I have passed. I wanted to go so! You go very light, and carry a stick like a broom-handle with a hunting-knife lashed to one end, and after you've run

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up and down hill for three or four hours you catch the elk—at bay in a pool of the river!—and stick him until he is dead, and come home {{SIC|triumphans|triumphant}}. I couldn't go because as yet I can't walk for two or three hours, let alone run. But good times are coming, and, between you and me, the elk which I have pictured as a foeman worthy of any steel is a kind of bashful, black-eyed gazel about three feet high.

I am writing to you from a deep chair, on a wide veranda which overlooks the whole valley. But the view is halved by a famous keena tree, which, though not very tall, is thirty-six feet around the base and discouraging to one in search of wide prospects. So I content me with what is near at hand, a hedge of heliotrope as high as my shoulder, a hedge of calla-lilies—a bright-green lizard is shining in the cup of one—and an amiable yellow chow-dog, who has been stalking lizards for fifteen years and is still waggishly afraid.

The pearls are on view at a banker's

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in Colombo, and I have had an offer for them—a good one, that I am going to accept—and whom do you think it is from! Well, it's from a man who represents a celebrated house that stands on Union Square, Noo York. And what do you think of that! Sure, Phylis, this orb is but pinched and small. To think of doing business with Union Square in the heart of a jungle! "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

Yours was a grand letter to get, and it must have been fun to write. No, I never shot tiger, but when I reach Calcutta I shall see one in a cage. It's Calcutta I'm going to, not Bombay. Why I felt called upon to say Bombay, I don't know. Things were changing places and whirling round the last time I wrote. But now behold me very steady again—a proficient speler, a good geografer, and your faithfullest servant,

{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}}.}}
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' I feel so personal this morning! I want to live differently, and

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have done with the picturesque. I don't want to be a Wandering Jew of a Christian any more. It's all on account of the Holy Man of Benares. I saw him this morning in his garden. He sits there year in and year out, teaching gently and wisely. Millions visit him, and go away better. They come in sackcloth and ashes and shaven heads, with the faith of little children, and are blessed; they come in the clothes of the West, armed with the cynicism of modernity, men whom the setting sun and great companies have robbed of belief, and they go away speaking reverently of Christ and Buddha. I want to write about the Holy Man of Benares with a big H. He is white with abstemation, and does not look like a Hindu, but more like one of the great senators from Virginia in the early days—shaven every morning to the last hair, frail and bloodless, with black, piercing, kindly eyes, and comforting words for the weak and weary. I could not stand more reverently in the presence of Christ. There he sits the long years

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of the latter end of his long, pure life, and millions are better and more faithful because he is sitting there. Just as stones continually dropped in the center of a placid pond send gentle waves to the shores, so the Holy Man of Benares, dropping golden words in the center of India, sends out waves of gentleness to the confines of gentle religion. And his people, who love animals—even the serpent—because God made them, take to themselves wings and fly into heaven or ever they come to die.

I went into the Monkey Temple this morning, and played with the absurd little people for two hours. They are of all sizes of monkeys, and live in the fear of three mangy dogs, but of no man. They sit upon the edge of the temple top and catch thrown cakes with all the adept movements and flourishes of professional base-ball players. They take you trustingly by the hand and lead you about; little green babies, with fringy faces, tell you hard-luck stories, and big gentlemen monkeys, with impressive teeth, intimi-

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date you dreadfully, threaten you with thrashings, and laugh till their sides ache because you are excusably afraid. Mother monkeys whisper the woes of the menage. And disgraceful old grandfathers swing furiously by their tails, or gather in gesticulating clumps, and tell each other smoking-room stories which one is too young to hear.

Here also is a Cow Temple—an archway out of the crowded street, a courtyard with a well in the center—marigolds have been thrown into that well every day for a thousand years—and the smell of rotting shell is as nothing to the smell of rotted marigolds. Crowded—crowded? Jammed, during the hours of worship, with cows. They go there unprompted. Singly, if very devout; in threes and fours, if more gossiply inclined. I cannot make out if the most of them go hoping to become better cows, or merely to see and criticize each other's new marigold wreaths.

In the streets of Benares the manytempled, the much-worshiped, the devout,

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are people stepped out of the Bible. Pilgrims in sackcloth and ashes, looking like lepers, with feet swollen and lame from the long pilgrimage, strolling prophets, fanatics—all the shades of brown and all the shapes of Eastern faces are there, shaven of head, ecstatic of sonl. Along the muddy Ganges are stairways of stone, stairways that have slidden into the river, stairways that are falling to pieces, stairways worn hollow, stairways that are building; above is a jagged line of many-colored temples and green trees. In the early morning you go a-boating in a fat boat with a roof; upon the roof you sit in a wicker chair, and rollop along the devout shore. The people bathe in all their clothes in the early morning, for the waters of this river are known to make a soul holy, and confidently supposed to make a body clean. Thousands of people bathing to their chins; thousands on the steps in many-colored dripping clothes; a white, hazy sun, hung low, and the stillness of a wilderness.

One man is standing on his head and

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hands facing some holy point across the river. This is the third morning of his incomprehensible inspiration; this afternoon he will turn right side up and take nourishment. Three days with the head on a hard stone! O Phylis, you and I belong to a race of feeble will and small faith!

Here also in the early morning the dead are burned. Shrouded, they lie with their feet in the Ganges until the faggoty pyre is ready. The relatives and friends sit on the edge of a sort of wharf, dangle their legs, gossip, and watch the disappearance of the deceased with a kind of "Well-there-goes-Bill" expression and empty pockets, for it is cruel costly to burn the dead. What is left over—a blackened stump, looking like a great folded bat—they chuck into the river, and whoever it once was—mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, lover, sweetheart—goes bobbing down with the current, growing less in bulk as the black crows tear at it—wetting their precious feet and protesting,

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but too hungry not to eat—until finally the last fragment goes down the gullets of the sharp-toothed sharks of the ocean.

Good heavens, lady, I've written you the longest letter in the world! And I that would spare you!

Do you know what I am saying to myself! Of course you don't. How should you!

{{right|offset=6em|Always faithfully,}}
{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}}.}}
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' Here I had a letter from you, and at the same time one from your father. If they came out by the same mail, they must have been delightful company for each other, as they most surely are for me. Are you and your father plotting against me, or did you happen on the same idea without mutual cognizance't Your father says that he wants me to work for him, and he says that he can make me useful—I hope he is not given to boasting. You tell me that I have done the picturesque to death, and that it is time I settled down. So be it,

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Phylis. I took your letters in my hand and went and sat out the night before the Taj under the huge Indian moon, and so decided. The Taj is a love-song in stone. A great and gentle king sang it over the girl he loved, and since then no one has sung or builded anjrthing so beautiful. It gave me a great yearning for a place to call home, and a roof to be over my head. I have had enough of standing in the wind. I am going to take your father's offer, and fold up the magic rug. I am coming home.

{{right|offset=6em|Faithfully,}}
{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Tomas Beauling}}.}}

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—128

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{{di|T}}HREE sights of a girl had taken aU the zest of wandering out of the heart of Mr. Beauling. So he said—most logically!—"I'm looking too high," and, with a soul as sad as tears, turned his back upon the girl, although her eyes had said as plainly as could be, "You are he," and wandered off to fish for pearls in the deep ocean. In a period measured by four seasons—it lasted ten thousand years and a few long days—he sent her six impersonal letters, and wrote her about three hundred and sixty-five personal ones. He fell low of a strange fever, and, coming out of the delirium, found that he had been writing adoring letters to the girl he loved. These he tore into little pieces and burned. Others he tore into even smaller pieces and cast

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upon many seas. If he had not loved her, he would have mailed whenever he pleased; loving her, he sent only as many letters as he dared—these of a descriptive cast. There was a spirit in his feet that kept saying, "Follow whither I lead, and you will come to the place where you would be," and the blockheadedness of the high-souled kept answering, "I am not 'born'; I am not worthy," and the man sided with the blockheadedness and in righteous agony spurned the wise spirit.

The selfish hulk thought only of himself, as is often the case with selfish persons, and not at all of the girl who would have given her pretty ears for the sight of him, who had said as plainly as eyes can say at parting, "You are he," and who, when she was spurned—for no other word will cover the monstrous density of the man—did not draw herself up haughtily and say to her proud heart, "Oh, very well!" but became meek and humble, sweet to people whom she had formerly twitted, and said in the privacy

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of her suffering soul, "How could ''he'' care for ''me!"'' And the pride which she held dearest was that she should love so far above ''her.'' So she wrote a few letters to the man, and made them as affectionate as she dared. And tore them up, and sent others that were less affectionate. And so it went on until one night at dinner her father spoke up and said:

"I can't get Beauling out of my head."

To this the girl's mind answered: "I can't get him out of my heart." But her many-wiled lips replied: "Can't you?"

"No," said her father. "I want him."

The girl's heart said: "Oh, my God, so do I!" Her lips said: "What for?"

"I could use him," said her father; "and I'm going to write and make him an offer."

The girl's mind, her heart, and her soul said: "I could die for him!" Her lips, "Why don't you?"

Then she slipped up-stairs and herself wrote many crafty pages. She told the man that he was wasting his life and talents. That she would like to respect

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him, but could not if he continued to hop about like a pea in a pan and amuse himself, for she could not regard his various enterprises as serious. That he was old enough to settle down and be useful; that she hoped he would. And that she would not care a snap if he were just an ordinary man, but she thought more highly of him than that, and was borne out by her father, who, etc. And she hoped he would not mind her taking enough interest in him to want him to be different. She wrote him a letter calculated to scorn him into compliance. She suggested that perhaps he had not sufficient strength of character, and that she was sorry if such proved the case. She dared him to settle down; she turned herself into an exquisite bully—she was already exquisite—and browbeat the only man in the world.

Down-stairs, Mrs. Dunbar said to Mr. Dunbar:

"She is very much changed since he went away."

And he said: "You know nothing

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about the man, and yet you want to fling our daughter at his head."

"So do you," said she.

"No," said he, "it isn't that; but if Phylis wants him, she—she shall have him."

"It's the same thing," said Mrs. Dun" bar; "you and Phylis—she covertly, you openly—are quite mad about that man, and"—she smiled gaily—"so am I."
{{dhr}}
{{sc|The}} maiden trip of a letter is apt to be a better managed affair than the latest excursion of an experienced globe-trotter. Phylis's letter and her father's hastened on their joint mission by train and steamer, and came to Beauling side by side on a brass platter stamped with gods, in the hands of a wrinkled Hindu, who was rather afraid of them—the letters, not the gods; familiarity breeds contempt Dunbar's letter, offering and requiring, was read first, for Beauling was a perfect child about his rice puddings, always keeping the raisins for the last. He devoured his raisin a dozen times,

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and, for all the scoldings and mockings, found that the taste was good. Then he waited till the moon rose, and going into the shadowy garden of the Taj, gave his imagination play.

Lest we should fall sick of life and die, the gods have given us two little times in every twenty-four hours when we may see ourselves as we would be. We may walk up the cool of the evening under the starry sky to the summit All-is-possible; or, in the early morning, between waking and rising, there is a moment when we are also allowed the direction of our dreams. These are the times when our scribblings are literature, our pockets filled, and our hands free. These are the times when the timid lover is bold, and the will of his heart spoken; when the forlorn hope is led, and the opportunity seized; when the prodigal rushes home to his old mother, and the arms of the forsaken are not empty.

So Beauling paced in the garden of the Taj, and gave glorious directions to glorious dreams. He paced the moon out

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of the sky and the stars to their beds; he paced away the night, and the dew rose under his feet. He paced up the dawn, but in the early hours of the white day he was rolled westward in a train of cars, his feet on the seat opposite, a pipe in his mouth, and a song in his heart. He saw the names upon the stations: Cawnpore—Lucknow—Delhi. He read them thus: "This is the way home, Tom Beauling." "This is the way to the haven where you would be." "This is the way to Phylis." But there were moments when he dared not believe that he had read her letter right.

The steamer ''Caledonia,'' with black smoke that gyrated in the sea-breeze pouring out of both funnels, stood in the harbor of Bombay, between the city and the emerald islands. An important puffy little donkey-engine was clacking up her anchor, and the pilot was fingering the brass bell-pull that should teach the engineer when to set the shafts revolving. Along the shoreward rail was a double line of people in thin white clothes and

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sun helmets. They looked like a company of animated mushrooms. Barefooted Hindus, in white blouses, red-turbaned and red-sashed, ran about, with luggage and chairs, and made loud, soft noises with their mouths. An old [[Don Quixote]] of a man, with a long, gray beard like a goat, interchangeable tan shoes, black alpaca clothes, shining as to the knees and elbows, flannel shirt, puffy brown helmet, with an audacious purple and white and gold cloth about it, and watery, weak blue eyes, elbowed the rail and looked mistily at the emerald shores. Beyond the lofty clock-tower, the government buildings, the sparkling white marble of Victoria, the resounding streets, the towers of silence, the shady avenues, the bubbling plague, the troubling crows, was a little piece of ancient history in which the old gentleman had been one of the little pawns. His hands trembled with martial reminiscence. He was in Lucknow Residence. Cannons roared. He saw again Henry Lawrence—"who tried to do his duty, may the Lord have mercy

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on his soul"—in his habit as he lived—and died. He saw the end descending, a pall striped with blood, and he heard again the distant pipes that had shrieked, "The Campbells are coming, O ho! O ho!" That was looking back many years. He looked back further, and came out to India again, in a sailing-ship, a brave, bright-cheeked boy, full of hope and conscientiousness. He had been brave and steadfast, a little part of history—a great failure. There are two kinds of admirables—the hard-working successes and the hard-working failures. The old gentleman belonged to the second class. But now he had done with it all—the hope and the bitterness, even the hard working. He was going back to the land of flowery hedges and delightful meadows; that was all that mattered to him. He was going away from the land of his unsuccess—going home, to look on a green field of England, and die. He spoke to the towering young man at his side.

"I have seen great doings in India, sir," he said—"great doings."

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They talked. The old gentleman told stories that he could not tell. He was a failure all around.

"I have seen great doings in India, sir—great doings."

Beyond that his imagination did not go.

The towering young man was full of life, ambition, and hope—he had nothing in common with the wreck of these things. Yet he was drawn to the old gentleman. He squired him like a son. And the two became real friends. Both were going home.

"I have seen great doings in India, sir—great doings," said the old gentleman.

The young man thought of a letter, and the moon on the Taj. He, too, had seen great doings in India.

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{{di|T}}HERE is no large body of water which can assume the profound smoothness of the Indian Ocean; to every other ocean there is a ground swell, as if it had never settled from the rude measures of the Creation. The Indian Ocean on good behavior is smoother than the sky above it—by day sunnier and bluer, starrier by night. It is so warm that the sun goes to bed naked, with an unperverted smile; so sweet that you hate to breathe out, so even tempered that ports swing wide around the clock, so unhurried that the restless abandon haste. But that voyage there were days of impatience for Beauling. He had received a letter which on the face of it was merely trying to slander him into good behavior; he thought he read a different and hap-

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pier meaning between the lines—there was space enough for any meaning, for she wrote a hand that laughed at pages—and he wondered if he had read right. Eight or wrong, an interest had been expressed, and he must make good. He saw himself discounting his birthright byhard work and clean living. "I will be a good man," he said humbly—at that time there was no better man in the world—"and that is worth many fathers."

They left Aden, with its Pullman-car-like buildings and scorched rocks, broiling to starboard and turned the corner into the Red Sea. It was most like sailing down a long sapphire set in raw red gold. The wind followed, so that the heat was no longer swept astern. And the wicked were punished together with the good. The former grew puffy and proud, for it was brought home to them that hell could be no worse. The latter resolved to be bad. Divine justice had been deceived. It is pleasanter to sin and roast, than to be good and roast. It is also easier.
{{nop}}

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The second day of it, in the evening, the old mutiny relic prattled to Beauling of England's green fields. And the same night the air stopped vitalizing his aged works, and of all that ship's company he was the first to reach home. They sank him quickly, with none to weep. The minister who read the sentences of committal looked, when he had done, like one recently drawn out of the water. People did not weep out of their eyes, but all over, like Niobe.

They made the canal at night, shipped a canal rudder, and steamed on slowly—a ship lost in a desert. The moon struck the sand with all the force of her imagination, paraded armies of monsters, created pinnacled cities, fashioned abandoned women of mountainous size who searched for their betrayers with ophthalmic eyes—an orchard of peach-trees in blossom, the gates of hell. She changed a peaceful village into millions of vermined gray apes that wrestled with vile contortions or became elusive, like a bank of rolling smoke. She whitened a jagged ridge

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into a host of angels, complete with wings, who played upon soundless harps. She said, "Little Ship, have you a Sculptor, or Painter, or Writer on board? If so, let him jump into the canal and drown muddily, lest he seem ''too'' foolish." No one went to bed until the moon had done conjuring.

"I couldn't see all the things she did," said one man to Beauling, "but I saw enough."

"So did I," said Beauling. He had looked this way and that way over the desert, and up, audaciously, into the very eyes of the blue-rimmed moon, and only seen Phylis coming to him across the sands or through the air. And that was enough. His heart was in tune; his imagination no more active than dough.

"Good night," he said.

"Made one feel small, didn't it?" said the man.

"Oh, no," said Beauling; "it couldn't do that. You see—I'm going home."
{{dhr}}
{{sc|He}} changed off at Port Said into the little twin-screw mailer ''Isis.'' She tore away

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for Brindisi at a twenty-two-knot clip, through a smoke of water, rolling, tunneling, throbbing, screaming with her siren, and flaunting her fragility.

"Crack it on, little ship!" said Beauling, heartily. "Make 'em sick—smash that big, green feller! Be a train—be a train!"

The little ship gurgled, lifted, shivered in all her steel nerves, as a short-haired dog shivers in the cold, and struck, and struck again, till the seas roared for the ferocity of her attack.

"Faster, little ship!" said Beauling; "faster—give 'em hell—I'm going home!"—Smash—bang!—"I'm going home!"

Two islands bullied the storm back from a long ribbon of a channel. The Isis flew at the smooth strip, went over it like a skater, and bucked the rage of waters at the other end. Beauling, drenched to the skin, clung to things, and, whenever the whole Mediterranean tried to get down his throat, howled with joy. He was maddened with the exhilaration of the opposing seas. It was so rough

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that people remained for forty-eight hours in the places where the sickness overtook them. They toiled not, neither did they spin. One steward alone could bear the smell of food; officers went down and out; only the captain, chief engineer, and cook remained whole of the ship's company. Of the passengers, two went to meals—Beauling, because he happened to be going home; and an aged, brandy-drinking judge from Bengal, because he happened to be thinking of something else.

Chiseled Greece rose out of the haze on the weather-beam and smoothed the seas. The dead walked, and the ''Isis,'' with a last flirtatious lift of her saucy heels, slipped through the gate of Brindisi Breakwater. The sun struck hot through the superimpending clouds, and the ''Isis'' sidled into her pier, looking like a ship carved out of frost

Beauling went to the hotel, and as he was about to enter, a woman in the street spoke to him, and called him by name.

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{{di|O|fl="}}H, Tom!" she said, all in a breath of rapid breathings, "Tibbs has left me, and I am all alone with Jack, and he is sick and nobody will take us in, and now you've come—I'm so glad you've come!—you'll help us, won't you, Tom?"

"Tibbs left you!" said Beauling. "What do you mean?"

"You know Tibbs," said the woman, "so good-natured and easily led he got into trouble—I don't know what; indorsed something and couldn't pay—I think—he wrote he couldn't face me—what could he have been thinking of, as if ''I'' cared!—and that I would never see him again, and would never know what had become of him."

"You poor child," said Beauling. She

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was slightly older than he. "Where is Jack?"

"He's—he," she said. "The man in the fruit-store let him sit there while I went to find some place to stay. We can't go on, poor little Jack is too sick; but he isn't going to die, Tom, he isn't. They said he was, at the hotel,—at all the hotels,—and that's why they wouldn't take us in."

"You haven't told me why you're here at all," said Beauling. "Come, we'll go and get Jack, and you tell."

The woman shook with a sob, and pointed out with a dejected, nervous little movement the direction in which they should go.

"He—"

"Who, Tibbs? Let's get it all straight," said Beauling.

"Yes, Tibbs." She spoke less hysterically. "He disappeared, and left a letter—poor old Tibbs!—as if it mattered what he'd done. I'll show it to you if you like—only I'd rather not, Tom; he said I must try and not think too hardly of

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him, and that I would never see him again, and that he wouldn't tell me where he was going. But I know him so well, Tom, that I knew where he would go as surely as if he had told me."

"Where is that?"

"Why, to his brother's in Singapore."

"And you were so sure of that that you started to follow him, to tell him you forgave him and couldn't do without him—you poor old Ellen!"

"Yes," she said, with a frank little smile, "I know Tibbs so well. We got here this morning, and poor little Jack didn't stand the trip well."

They turned a corner, and the woman led into a dingy fruit-shop—mostly dirt, dusty wine-bottles, and the usual assortment of played-out fruits, blackened and small, which you see in tropical and semitropical countries. On a pile of plaited mats, that looked as though they contained all the germs of all the diseases from A to Z and others undiscovered, a little child, who seemed to exist without the aid of blood, rested wearily, and read

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out of a "[[David Copperfield]]." He had a big, sickly head, brown eyes like a spaniel, precociously intelligent, and a neck shockingly delicate in the back where it took the weight of the skull, legs like broom-handles, and hands of great length and character like a sculptor's. He had been emaciated and on the point of death since his birth. He looked up and smiled bravely at his mother—looked at the man she had brought, and smiled joyfully.

"Upon my word," said the child—he could not have been more than twelve—"if it isn't Mr. Beauling!"

"So it is," said Beauling. "And of all the odd places to find you, Jack! And how did you leave Lettice?"

"She's such a dear!" said Jack. "But isn't this delightful, mama?"

He struggled to his feet, pale and dizzy, and gave Beauling a firm handshake.

"What's the plan?"

"First, there's got to be a big talk," said Beauling. "And a general tabooing of all plans we don't like. But before

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that we're going to have a feast up at the hotel."

"I suppose they'll let us in, mama, now that there's a—a man along." His voice quavered, and he looked as if it was Ms most bitter burden that he could not protect his mama from all the impositous heartlessness of this world and the next. As they went out of the shop, he reeled smartly into a barrel of tangerines.

"Jack," said Beauling, "I want exercise, and I'm going to pick you up and carry you."

"Don't trouble, Mr. Beauling," said Jack; "I can manage it."

Three steps were conviction that he could not "Mr. Beauling," he said, "I'll bet you a shilling you c-can't carry me."

"I'll bet you I can," said Beauling. He lifted the child, still grasping the "David Copperfield"—a long, transparent finger marking the place—and the child, keeling over with fatigue and the heat, fainted in his arms. Beauling fell to mothering the mother and the child.

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She clung to his arms, distracted and weeping. After a little the child came to weakly. His head lolled from one shoulder to the other.

They went into the stony, street-level office of the hotel. Behind the desk, a black, big, fat Italian, with yellow whites to his eyes, a great expanse of dirty shirtfront, and stocky fingers yellowed with cigarettes, and finished as to the nails with new moons the color of ebony, grunted with the first squall of an important rage when he saw her, and wriggled ingratiatingly, like a newly caught eel, when he realized that she was cavaliered by so large a man as Beauling.

"Excellence will understand—excellence always does," he said rapidly. "I saw at once the child would die. The law so bitter to the innkeeper in whose house occurs a death! He is dead—no? The consumption—"

"I want two rooms on the water side for this lady," said Beauling. "First, you will get the best doctor—no, the best three doctors in Brindisi."
{{nop}}

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"Impossible." said the proprietor, oilily. "Excellence understands—the law—"

Beauling choked with rage.

"Put me down, Mr. Beauling," said Jack, faintly. When he was down he stood as upright as he could.

"Sir," he said, in pure Italian—the holy flame of tongues had lighted on that child's head—"I am not going to die yet awhile."

"It is enough," said the proprietor. "The little excellence is greatly wasted, and will surely die. I cannot take them."

The woman cried bitterly. The child reeled to a rush-bottomed chair and flopped down. Beauling reached out, got his fingers in the Italian's collar, and with one movement jerked him clear over the top of the desk, and landed him, a mass collapsing into itself with terror, and on the verge of apoplexy. He loosed his hold, and after a time the dark blood, brought leaping to the Italian's face, began to stream back into his body, purpling the veins of the neck as it passed

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through them. A proper pallor spread under his yellow hide.

"Porthos!" exclaimed Jack, clenching his hands with delight and admiration.

Beauling eyed the Italian as a cat eyes a mouse. He was furiously angry, but his mouth, as always when he saw red, had a whimsical expression of amused tolerance. His rage gradually waned before the abject collapse of the proprietor. It is tactless opposition which keeps men boiling.

"Two rooms on the water side," said Beauling, under his breath.

"Athos!" whispered Jack to himself.

"And if I hear of any more brutality and bullying of women and children, I shall be obliged to come from wherever I am and kill you." This sweetly.

"D'Artagnan!" said Jack.

"And now you shall send out for the doctor, and give orders to have a table laid for three on the balcony." This very sweetly.

"Aramis!" said Jack.

A one-eyed servant, cringing like a

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timid mouse, for he knew that the humiliation of his master would be passed on, scuttled out of a lurking-place and endeavored to leave the room. He failed to pass the scope of his master's vision. His master called upon him to stop, and proceeded to give him a tremendous broadside of orders, in the ringing voice of an admiral directing captains in fight.

"{{lang|fr|Pat à pouff!}}" said Jack. Beauling turned to Jack.

"Dear old man," he said, in a choking voice, "you're going to get well, and—and you stand for that—and—and—"

''"Beauling!"'' cried Jack.

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{{di|U}}P-STAIRS the child, wrapped about with hot typhoid, raved in many languages. His mother nursed him, and a doctor watched. His ravings were all of a little girl named Lettice. He had a photograph of her on a chair by the head of his bed. She was an impudent rogue of a child of twelve, with straight, dark hair cut off square at the shoulders like a page's; she had mischievous, puckered eyes, and grinned like a pussy-cat. She looked as healthy as a butterfly.

"Won't you be faithful, Lettice—''won't'' you?" wailed the sick child.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|It}} was sweating hot. Beauling, in white pajamas that clung to him in dark patches as if his body was sucking at the silk, bent over his open valise, and packed it for a long sea voyage. He was going

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quixotically to retrail it to Singapore on the hypothetical chance of there finding the delinquent Tibbs, of speaking his mind to him, and of sending him back, if necessary by freight, to rejoin his distracted wife and terribly sick child. Beauling hated to leave these alone, but one of the doctors appeared a responsible man, not without kindness, and it seemed that Beauling's absence on even an utterly hopeless search for her husband would afford the wife more relief, while it lasted, than could possibly be furnished her by his gentle and considerate presence. A cable sent to Tibbs at his supposed address had met with no acknowledgment, but still the wife said, "Won't you go, Tom? I ''know'' he's there—won't you?" What it must cost a man on the home trail to double and go back did not occur to her. She knew nothing of Phylis and the Spanish castle. Beauling wrote:
{{dhr}}
''Dear Phylis:'' To me, counting the days between here and home, came Fate, say-

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ing, "You must put off the time—you must go back." But it won't be long—only back to Singapore and around the other way. Don't think I'm slighting your letter and your injunctions for a small cause. For, indeed, even if I were to completely lose your regard I would do as I am doing—not otherwise. I had hoped to win favor by going home as straightly as the shingler's hammer goes to the head of the nail, but it seems the shingler was to slip a little on the roof, to miss his aim, and have to strike again. But this time I shall send the hammer home, and, God willing and you helping, the nail also. . . .
{{dhr}}
What does it cost a man on the home trail to double and go back? I think it cost Beauling not even a pang. It seemed so much righter to break a lance for a poor little, sobbing, silly woman than to rush like a whirlwind into the very arms of the world's desire. He tiptoed into the sick-room to have a last look at Jack. Jack was so thin that you were hardly

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conscious of his body under the sheet He was more like an abstract intellect gone mad than a sick physical being. His delirium still harped on Lettice. Now he called that little pussy-cat "Gorgeous Arabian," and now "The haven where he would be." The precocity of his ravings was really shocking. A shadow streaming with tears was ever between them. They had packed his heart in ice, but they could not cool his love. He would give her his heart if he could get it out

Three years later a boy of fifteen brought out a book of verses—a few sheets of cheap paper between pale-blue boards. The dedication was:
{{dhr}}
{{c|{{ib|To Lettice For the Ages of Ages}}}}
{{dhr}}
The book received but one press notice—four lines of utter and just condemnation—and nobody but those directly in-

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terested in Jack read the book. Then, as always, you were amazed at his maturity, but bitterly disappointed for him and for yourself that the verses were not prettier. Here is the prelude for a fair sample:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
Had I the ear to make you music,
:And the wide world fill
With the songs I ''feel'' about you—
:Oh, the valley and the hill,
And the river and the ocean,
:And the little woodland rill
Would listen to my singing, lovely singing,
:And be still!
}}

The wide world is already filled with that sort of singing. Any practised writer can do it for volumes—many do, alas!—and without proper guidance you cannot find anything of the real Jack in the pages of his one and only book. You must remember that he was only fifteen, very much in love—with a passion that had endured longer than do the passions of most grown men—and dying. Then the book, if you can find a copy anywhere,

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would burn for you with a pure light—small, like that of a candle—and occupy your heart It is so fearless and optimistic and healthy: not good work—far from it—but brave work. He knew that the game was played out, and that he had lost. Did he turn his back, so that he should not see his colors finish last? Oh, no. He marked them all the way round in the tail of the procession,—the fainting jockey, the gasping horse,—and when the race was done, he turned to those who held him in great worship and smiled a gallant smile. One person alone could have saved the book—the minx Lettice. Had she loved Jack, her listening would have made his songs beautiful. But she didn't She loved him rather less than the third finger of her left hand, over which somebody had slipped a man's seal-ring made small. As a matter of fact, the rascal considered herself engaged—she was only fifteen, mind you—to the son of a belted earl. At sixteen she actually married him, and—they led each other dances. But by that time Jack

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and his book were dead. I can see Lettice reading the dedication of his life and its epitaph:
{{dhr}}
{{c|{{ib|To Lettice For the Ages of Ages}}}}
{{dhr}}
and saying, "Silly boy!"
{{dhr}}
{{sc|Tom Beauling}} kissed his little friend and lover good-by. Outside it was still blowing great guns. Beauling and the ''Osiris'' went into the storm at railroad speed—she was sister to the ''Isis,'' and could spin twenty-three knots in fair weather, twenty-two in foul. Beauling, because his face was turned from home, wondered if the back of a tortoise would not have afforded swifter locomotion.

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{{di|O}}N a space of level green lawn, roped off from a rainbow crowd,—Hindus, Malays, Burmese, Parsees, Jews, Chinamen, and white men, civilians and soldiers,—teams representing the "Black" McKenzies and the Cawnpore "Larrups" were fairly busy playing a match of football. Great excitement prevailed for the tropics, because in half an hour's play one of the Larrups had been butted in the stomach by one of the McKenzies and knocked down. People spoke in awed whispers of that "fiend incarnate, Burdock" of the McKenzies. His supporters gave him a regular ovation. One man, who in his time had seen Yale play Princeton, was not particularly impressed. Indeed, he paid no attention to the game whatever, but went shouldering through the crowd in search of a weak

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individual whom his intimates called Tibbs.

Beauling was in a bad temper. He had had the misfortune to sprain his wrist while crossing to Port Said, and it was not yet whole. In the canal, a tramp from Australia way had broken a hawser, swung out of her siding, grounded fore and aft across the channel, and held up navigation for two days. The run down the Red Sea had been a record-breaker—for heat. The wind had blown in such a way as to neutralize the draft from the steamer's speed and create a motionless blast-furnace atmosphere for her passengers. To make matters still more trying, he ran out of collars, and there was no starch on board. To Beauling, who was in the habit of saying, "When in doubt, change your clothes," this state of affairs was simply ghastly. Furthermore, an English lady whom he had met steamer-wise—she was going out to join her husband in Ceylon—had had the bad taste to fall in love with him and make a scene. The passage along the line be-

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tween Colombo and Singapore was made in a small ship, fairly groaning with passengers—Beauling said they were packed like bananas in the bunch—and threatened to end on a mud-bank off the dismal city of Penang. At Singapore his first inquiry after the delinquent Tibbs had met with an enraging reply. "Tibbs? Oh, yes, he's here—heard of him the other night at the Lascelles'; wasn't there myself; don't go out much, you know; heard he got it up the nose—hurt some young lady's feelings."

"Where will I find him?"

"Most likely at the foot-ball—McKenzies and Larrups, y' know—playin' off a tie or somethin'."

"All right—and much obliged."

Beauling looked this way and that over the heads of the crowd.

"If I'd run across a case of penitence and contrition," he said, "I'd know what to do; but to find he isn't penitent and contrite, but as cocky as if he had done something to be proud of, getting drunk at a mixed liarty and playing the

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fool—I—I—I believe I'll pick him tip by the neck and kick him till I feel better."

Almost immediately he came on the object of his search—a little, stout man in white flannels, smoking a long, thick cheroot. The little, stout man held himself importantly, and blew out the smoke by way of a little crooked nose that turned up at the end. The scarf around his helmet was positively garish, likewise his flowing cravat. A broad leathern belt held up his trousers snugly, and made you distinctly aware that the girth of what he was pleased to call his waist was greater than that of his chest Beauling's anger melted at the sight of the good-natured and odious little man.

"Hallo there!" he said.

"Why, it's you!" said Tibbs. "Well met! Boys, here's Beauling—Tom Beauling."

He extended a pudgy little hand, which Beauling squeezed to some purpose.

"Ouch—ouch!" said Tibbs. "My dear boy—my dear boy—" and he looked sadly at the afficted member, which had

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suddenly become deep red and bloodless white in irregular splotches.

"Did you get my cable?" said Beauling.

Tibbs wriggled.

"Well, you know," he began—"you see, didn't think it called for 'n answer. Was going to come, anyway."

"What!" said Beauling, in amazement.

"All a mistake," said Tibbs; "funniest thing in the world; but here—can't talk here; too much crowd—tired of standing up, very. Come to my rooms; got comfortable quarters; give you a good drink."

They went to Tibbs's rooms. He had a whole second floor and two servants.

"You're pretty comfortable for an absconder," said Beauling, severely.

"Ugly word, that," said Tibbs; "but funny that you should use it under the circumstances, very funny—all a mistake, you know. Oh, by the way, cable from Ellen this morning—Jack out of danger—all well."
{{nop}}

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"Then I ''will'' take a drink," said Beauling.

Tibbs called a servant, and spoke to him impressively.

"To Ellen and Jack," said Beauling.

"I'll drink ''that'' toast," said Tibbs, warmly.

"Well?" said Beauling.

Tibbs set down his glass, empty.

"All be grateful to me some day," he said. "Must tell you, Beauling—in confidence, you understand—funniest thing ever. Margins did it—held some damned American securities, God bless 'em—more 'n I could carry—small margin, very. Went down and down—only point to go—half a point—ruin staring me in the face. Broker 'phoned for instructions. Should he hold on? Could I put up more margin? I couldn't—hadn't a cent in the world. But what did I do—flunk? No. I said, 'What goes down must go up.' 'Phoned my brokers, 'Hold on till hell freezes over!' Awful thing to do—ruined, anyway—thought might 's well be disgraced too. Securities down

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another point—broker demanding margin—awful moment—flunked and ran—couldn't face Ellen—thought of suicide—came out here. Awful state of mind—distracted—lay awake nights! Hu! funniest thing ever! Said to a man at the club one day, 'Got hard hit when So-and-so went to 39.' Man looked at me 's if he thought I was lying. 'So-and-so never did go to 39,' says he. 'Never went below 39½—had a lot myself—know what I'm talking about—and it only stayed there a minute,' says he. 'What!' I said, 'what?' {{' '}}Way up now,' says he. I hadn't followed market at all—hadn't looked at the papers—hadn't felt like it. 'How high?' said I. 'About 107,' says he. Made me feel creepy all over. Seemed some damned American millionaire—God bless him—named Dunbar— What's the matter?" Beauling had jumped at the name.

"Nothing," he said.

"And another one," Tibbs continued, "named Wareing"—Beauling laughed aloud—"got hold of the damned thing

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an' said, 'Hey diddle-diddle,' an' up she went."

Tibbs positively smirked.

"Had one chance left—cabled the brokers, 'Sell So-and-so at market'; was all right if hadn't sold out on me at 39½. Answer came next day, 'Sold so many shares So-and-so at 112.' Felt little 'shamed at first, Beauling—you can understand that, can't you? Then felt better—big drunk, three days—all right now; booked passage Monday on ''Leda''—off to Ellen—glorious reunion—wife made happy—boy all right—devoted father, rich's hell. Awful rich now, Beauling."

Beauling lay back in his chair like a frigate in a calm. All the wind had been taken out of all his sails.

"Tibbs," he said at length, "I've a great mind to give you a thrashing. I think it would do us both a world of good. Just because you were a dishonest little coward and ran away, your wife nearly died of heart-break and your boy of typhoid. Just because you were too foot-

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less to answer a cable, I've come sixteen thousand miles out of my way, and I had something a lot better to do than hunting up miserable little hounds of husbands for people—sprained my wrist, been without clean collars for ten days, crowded like a pig in a hot ship, and only to be told that I needn't have come, that you were going back anyway, and—and—"

"Awf'ly glad to see you, you know," said Tibbs.

Beauling arose.

"Tibbs," he said, "that remark was unfortunate. And I'm going to make you remember it as long as you live. I'm glad that your dishonest speculation has turned out well—I'm ashamed to say that I am glad. But it is for Ellen's sake and for Jack's—not yours. I'm glad that you are going back too, because, God knows why, they seem to love you and want you. And right there my gladness stops. If you had been a decent man when you married, and not a worthless, good-natured little drunkard, you would have given your son, who has got

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a mind like an express-train, a healthy body and a chance to set the world on fire. That's the chief score I've got against you. He's the dearest, winningest, cleverest, bravest little man in the world; and just because his father was a drunken, self—pampered little sot, he's got to suffer all his short life, and go out like a candle. I forgive you for bringing me out here. I forgive you for deserting your wife. I forgive you for being a coward and running away, and for being dishonest and making a fortune. But I can't forgive you for Jack."

"Awf'ly severe," said Tibbs, with downcast eyes—"awf'ly."

"Stand up," said Beauling.

Tibbs arose. Beauling took him by the shoulders and turned him around.

"I'm very much bigger and stronger than you," said Beauling, "and I shall never take much pride in what I am going to do—hold still!"

"What you going do, Beauling?" said Tibbs, uneasily.

"Tibbs," said Beauling, "I'm going

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to give myself the personal satisfaction of kicking you just once as hard as I can."

Tibbs rose, not ungracefully, a few inches from the floor and sailed rapidly into the wall at the further end of the room.

"There!" said Beauling.

"Oh, my nose—my nose!" wailed Tibbs. It had been smashed against the wall, and was bleeding swiftly.

"Put a brass door-key down the back of your neck," said Beauling, "and I dare say it will stop."

Tibbs choked down a sob.

"And then," said Beauling, sweetly, "we can go around to ihe club and get some tea."

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{{di|B}}EAULING had written to Dunbar from Brindisi. At Hong-Kong he received a cable saying, "Come when you have wound up your affairs." So that was all right. He could foresee nothing that could delay him again. The way home was pleasant. He knew the highroads of the East as a New York banker knows Wall Street, and all ports were full of friendly faces. But the homing was not without melancholy, for he was saying "Good-by" to many people whom he would never see again. At the ex-missionary's house in Hong-Kong he sang until the heat became endurable; then he kissed the five children, tipped the servants, and went down through the night to the Yacht Club. The young men looked older, but they were as free from care as ever, and still talked of Wareing week

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and the Shen-se coal fizzle. They made Beauling sing for the last time. And he, the sweat rolling off him, for it was bitter hot, sat at the tuneless piano and sang the old songs. Certain great merchants of China heard that he was passing through, and sent him presents of carved jade and amethyst. One—the revered Chang Lo—sent him a string of beads, alternately pierced pearls and cunningly carved gold, with this word:

"He is leaving us forever because he is going to his beloved. Take her this, esteemed Beauling, from the honorable old Chang Lo. It will guard her from the evils of this world and the next."

Beauling thrust the chain and the note into his breast pocket, and he blushed at thought of the astute guesswork of the Honorable Chang Lo. Then he sang the love-song of Taikon in what sounded something like the original Mandarin, and the young men howled with joy. They went aboard ship with him, carrying their own wine in tubs packed with ice, annexed the saloon, and waked

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the sleeping wild-fowl in the far-off bays of the harbor. With the first light they went ashore, reckless and careless; and Beanling, looking upon them for the last time, realized for the first time that, in spite of all the gaiety and the proud spirits, they were sorrowful exiles in a strange city, far from the walls of the fathers. And he went on his way saddened. It was the same at Nagasaki, at Kobe, and at Yokohama. Faces that he had learned to look for when he shored at those ports smiled on him again; voices long since familiar told him again of trials and ambitions. Mothers drew back the coverlets, and showed him the youngest born. And many little children made much of him. Ahead was a narrowing ocean; behind, thousands of miles of good-bys. There are few faces to which, with the knowledge that we shall never see them again, we can say good-by without emotion. To say good-by with the meaning, "Good luck," "God be with you," is so easy, so pleasant; to say "Good-by. I shall never see your face

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again"—that is so difficult. The first Beauling said with all his heart; the second, with all his courage. He was hull-down for the well-beloved, but he was leaving all the old homes for a new. But when the steamer had sunk the Hawaiian Islands, the old life had become a companionable ghost of a recollection. And his face was ever turned forward—north by east to the Golden Gate by which he should enter the land of his great hope.

Mist and cold closed in; the winds passed over the bergs of Bering Strait and blew upon them; the seas ran gray and high. For days the fog-horn vomited wind and sound, the hoarse, shaking "Beware!" of the ocean. They sailed by dead-reckoning, an ill-built ship, manned by Orientals and crowded to her last berth with restless humanity. They steamed slowly. On the tenth day a barren coast rose ahead, and a pilot-boat, double-reefed, shining like a yacht, came out to them, whipping across the waves and lifting like a duck. Through the drizzle they saw the gray seal on the

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rocks, and, far beyond, the masts of shipping and the precipitous water-front of San Francisco.

Beauling's heart was singing a delightful song with this burden:
{{dhr}}
{{c|''Four and a half days to New York.''}}
{{dhr}}
When suddenly it was bruited about that there was plague in Yokohama, and the ship, with all souls, would have to remain for ten days in quarantine. After the first indignant outburst, people did not speak to each other at all, but became sullen and brooding, Beauling among them.

A worse misfortune befell. The awfulness of delays increases in direct ratio as the distance decreases. If you were in Singapore and the Only One was in New York, you could force yourself to wait over a steamer. You would suffer, but you could do it. Arriving at San Francisco, a delay of ten days would be torture infernal. You would grow thin, your temper would spoil—you could ''just''

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manage to live through it. But suppose your beloved was in the very next room, the wall of which was too thick to transmit sound, and you were compelled to wait ''there'' for ten days! It would be impossible. Your heart would knock out your sides, you would go mad as to your mind, and you would die after three quarters of an hour by the clock. If precisely that had happened to Beauling, he would have simplified matters by knocking the wall down; but what did happen was next-best bad. The quarantine officers brought out papers from the desired shore, and, a San Francisco "Social Topics" falling to the lot of Beauling, he learned that Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar of New York, with their daughter. Miss Phylis Dunbar, and a party of friends, transported thither in two palatial cars—the ''Lasca'' and the ''Weda''—were at that moment at the Palace Hotel of the Metropolis of the Pacific Slope.

People knew him no longer, and fled when he approached. He had the port deck to himself, and there, barring occa-

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sional moments when he went below to shave savagely or eat savagely, he walked out the ten days of vile durance and most of their accompanying nights. His language, when he did speak—and it was only to hardened men—bordered on the improbable. His clothes hung about him loosely.

On the morning of the tenth day, a shambling giant was allowed to go ashore. He spoke to the customs officers in a weary voice, collapsed into a cab, and was jolted to the Palace Hotel. The clerk told him in a confidential tone that Mr. Dunbar and party had left an hour ago for the races. Mr. Beauling fasted and followed.

A crowd of young men and girls in lovely clothes came laughing across the paddock. A gigantic hurricane of joy swept suddenly into their midst, and scattered them as a wolf may be supposed to scatter sheep.

One man, the favored son of a Pittsburg magnate, who was of the party, said that, "Barrin' demonstrations, he and

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she met as if they was engaged to be married."

Beauling plunged heavily on the long shot in the three remaining races, and won three times. It simply had to be like that.

Beauling, bag and baggage, went home in two palatial cars named ''Lasca'' and ''Weda.'' They were occupied by his heart's desire and himself, and a number of other people.

—180

-181

—182

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{{di|I}}N the top of a very high building down-town, some twenty stories above his regular offices, Mr. Dunbar had what was known in business circles as "Dunbar's Emergency Suite." This consisted of a bedroom, baths, small kitchen, library, squash court, reception-room, and dining-room. Here lunch was laid for him and two or three friends every day, and here he was in the habit of retreating when he wished to avoid people, and here he sometimes slept. The windows looked over the harbor, and the apartment was situated so high that it had the double advantage of seaside and of mountain air. Here, whenever the market went to pieces and the street grew frantic, Mr. Dunbar was usually to be found playing a game of squash with himself or with a clerk to whom he had had the game taught by an

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English expert, enjoying the shower-bath or one of the comfortable reading-chairs in the library. This library was quite a charming room. It was embellished with a Turner, a Corot—you looked out of deep forest into a meadow full of cow-slips—the portrait of Lady Ingoldsby by Gainsborough, some rare bronzes, and some two hundred thousand dollars' worth of early American books.

A big bull movement in the market terminated that May in a criminal struggle between two powerful factions for the control of a railroad in the Northwest. The prices for the securities involved reached fabulous quotations, but the rest of the market smashed, groveled, shrieked. Investment stocks as safe as the Bank of England went about asking people to take them for nothing. Money became scarcer than charity. The banks shut up like clams.

Now it happened—it usually did happen at similar times—that Mr. Dunbar was comfortably out of the market. So when prices shrank to absurdities he was

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in a position to step cheerfully in, buy everything in sight, and simply wait. This he did. In two days the fighting factions came to terms. In a week the level of prices was again high. Mr. Dunbar spent a week unloading. Then, about eleven o'clock one morning, feeling very much at peace with the whole world, he retreated to his emergency suite, sweated in the squash court for half an hour, showered, dressed, commanded luncheon for three, and went into the library to write a note.
{{dhr}}
''Dearest Lady:'' I look at my holdings, and the luck of recent years, and believe that I am the richest man in the world. I think of you, and know that I am.
{{right|offset=2em|J. D.}}
{{dhr}}
This he sent by a clerk to Mrs. Dunbar in the country. Then he was waited on by a courtly, white-haired gentleman representing a famous firm of jewelers uptown. The gentleman was accompanied by a bony, grim-visaged clerk who car-

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ried a big, black-leather case. The case was opened, and the light fell on six long strings of perfect white pearls, each as big as a cherry.

"Those will do," said Mr. Dnnbar.

The bony clerk, hugging the black case to his chest, took the first train for the country.

Then Mr. Dunbar bethought him of another person, and wrote:
{{dhr}}
''Dearest Phylis:'' If there is anything that you can think of that you want, please let me know. I've just sent your mother some pearls. You must play the spy, and tell me if she really likes them. Answer by messenger.
{{right|offset=4em|Affectionately,}}
{{right|offset=2em|J. D.}}
{{dhr}}
This was sent out by another clerk.

Then Mr. Dunbar called up his own office by telephone and asked for Mr. Beauling. He laughed all over to hear one of his own office-boys inquire in a loud, squeaky voice:
{{nop}}

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"What is the nature of your business?"

He then discovered himself, and caused a panic.

Presently Beauling's voice, rather tired and very busy, came up to him.

"Wareing is coming here to lunch," said Dunbar; "if you haven't anything better to do, join us—twenty-third floor."

"Going up to lunch with Mr. Dunbar?" asked the secretary of the Cuyar hoga Central. He had stepped in on business.

"Yes," said Beauling.

"That's the way millionaires are made," said the secretary.

A rat-faced boy dashed into the office, laid'slip of paper on Beauling's desk, nodded brightly, and went out on a run.

"No, that's the way," said Beauling. "That kid is thirteen years old. They tell me he had been down-town for three years, and that he has never lost a second."

Mr. Dunbar had one more interruption. Seven reporters, representing seven pow-

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erful dailies, sent in seven cards. He spoke with them at the door. They wanted very much to know if he knew anything about the proposed dividend on B. T. U.

"I know nothing," said Mr. Dunbar.

The seven reporters hurried away, carrying this important announcement to seven headquarters.

Mr. Dunbar ''was'' B. T. U.

At this time it occurred to him that a favorite pipe—the one mended with sealing-wax—was lurking somewhere in one of the drawers of the writing-table. He longed to smoke that particular pipe, and he began to search for it. In one of the drawers he came across a package of old photographs held together by elastics. He looked them over, and laughed to see the odd figures that old-fashioned clothes made of some of his most fashionable friends. Part of the package slipped from his hands and was scattered over the floor, face down. He began a childish game with himself, guessing by the appearance of the back what the pic-

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ture would represent ''"Sanderson and Treek,"'' he read. "That will be Wiswold, in his yachting-suit. ''Bach.'' That will be Hunter, taken for the class-book at New Haven—no, it's—why, it's little Peters, who never went there at all! ''Annatole, Paris, France.'' Hm-m! that will be Vicomte d'Unice—no, it's Bernhardt as ''Phèdre.'' Gilt gryphon's head; no name; that will be—" The photograph in question was yellow and stained. A shadow crossed Dunbar's face. "I thought I had destroyed that," he said. He turned the photograph over, and looked at himself as he had been at twenty-two, and at a beautiful young woman whom he had known in those days.

"We can never quite atone for some things," he said. "I can't forget you," he said to the young woman. "I wish I could; but I think I will tear you up—I thought I had long ago."

He tore, or rather broke, the photograph into little pieces.

Beauling was announced.

Dunbar dropped the rest of the photo-

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graphs into the drawer and closed it He looked up at Beauling, whom he had come to regard with great affection.

"Tom," he said, "to-morrow is a bank holiday, and if yon We nothing better to do, come out with me to the country this afternoon for over Sunday."

"Grand!" said Beauling.

"And, Tom, I have some news for you. Wareing and I are going to start a bank in the fall, and, if you see it that way, we are going to make you our junior partner. I thought I'd tell you."

Beauling glanced about the room with dancing eyes.

"Mr. Dunbar," he said, "if you had had any idea of how much what you have said was going to mean to me, you wouldn't have told me in such a small room. You never told me," he said, "whether I was doing my work well or not, never made a sign, and now you tell me this. Don't let me shake hands with you," he said; "I'll hurt you if I do. I believe if I were to shake hands with the Statue of Liberty at this moment, I'd hurt her."
{{nop}}

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"What a kid you are, Tom!" said Dunbar, smiling.

"I've got to let it out somehow," said Beauling. In one corner of the room he perceived a Japanese bronze representing two billowy-muscled wrestlers. It weighed perhaps five hundred pounds. "This will do," he said. He forthwith picked the bronze up in his arms and, holding it like a baby, marched once around the room in triumph.

"Got it out?" said Dunbar.

"Not quite," said Beauling. He started on a second tour, during the completion of which Griswold B. Wareing of Pennsylvania entered.

"Hello!" he said, "what's all this?"

"Feathers!" said Beauling, and set down the bronze softly.

Wareing, always eager and curious, at once tried to heft the bronze. He could not budge it.

"Dunbar," said he, pointing to Beauling, "I'd be proud to be the father of that."

"Luncheon is served," announced the butler.

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{{di|T}}HE room which Beauling always occupied when he stayed with the Dunbars, with a fine view of Pelham Bay over the hillside wood, Long Island, burnt siena in the distance, and many ships passing up and down the Sound, was not without traces of his frequent occupations. In the attached dressing-room were two pairs of smart boots in trees, his riding-things, several pairs of flannel trousers, tennis shoes, a Mmona, and an assortment of hats which he always liked to have about and which he never wore. A small steamer trunk contained other possessions, and a huge pigskin bag those necessaries which he brought when he came and took when he went Mr. Lilac, a perfect piece of mechanism from the Old World, had just completed the unpacking of this—writing{{peh}}

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case, ebony-backed hair-brushes, evening clothes, shirts, studs, etc. The new millionaire—it meant that in the short—was just in from a stroll with Phylis. But the only sign of his being in the vicinity was the roaring noise of a shower-bath. Mr. Beauling spent the most of his vacations in doing one of four things-exercising, bathing, changing his clothes, or violently restraining himself from telling Phylis what was in his heart. And she was satisfied to have it so. Some day he would speak. She knew that. So did he. What had occurred during the particular stroll in question is not known, but when he was about half dressed Mr. Beauling threw himself into a loungingchair and communed thus:

"One thing or the other," he said; "I've got to tell her or go away forever. On the one hand, I'm nobody at all, and I haven't been honest, for I should have told them that in the beginning; on the other hand, she—she cares for me. I know I am a blind fool—I've just seen it And she's been caring all along, just

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as I have, ever since the beginning—and I didn't guess. She does—I know it now. Oh, I know it now! If she didn't care, I could just stay on and love her and try not to bother her, and it would be all right, because I would be the only one hurt. But she does care—and I am nobody, a man without a father—and it isn't right for me to go to her and say, 'Phylis, will you take for your husband a man that is handicapped like that?' Why, her people are everything; they've done everything for me, and I think they like me; but if they knew!—even if she said it didn't make any difference—and, bless her! that's what she would say—they couldn't be expected to hear of it. And I'm hanged if I'd have the face to go against them—considerin' how kind they've been to me. If they say ''no,'' it's got to be ''no''—no matter what I say, no matter what she says. The best thing for me to do is to go to her and say, 'Phylis, I've tried to be a mountain, but I'm only a rolling stone—no good to anybody—and I've got the call and I want out,

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and if you like me a little you must forget all about it. I'm no good, and I'm going—good-by,' and a string of lies like that, and then go. Yes, that will be kindest in the long run. And the rest! I couldn't forget, but somehow—somehow there must be uses for a maimed man and things for him to do. There is the friendly old sea, and deserts and forests, and places other people can't get to. I'll go to those, and write about 'em, and live clean and not forget' and be as faithful to her as if she belonged to me, and endure and know that I have done right.

"That's about the selfishest line of thought I've ever had," he said. "If she cares for me—and she does—and I care for her, why, there is nothing else in God's world that counts—family, position, money—lack of family, lack of position, lack of money! By George, I'll be the head of a new family! I've nothing to be ashamed of, and I'll hold my head as high as a mast' and so shall my sons and their sons after them. Go back far enough, and there's a nobody in the pedi-

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gree of everybody. There is no tongue in this world sharp enough to hurt me. I'll go to her, and say—and say—I won't have to say anything. She knows, and I know.

"Oh, you Phylis! . . ." he said.

"I can see her coming up to me, so tall and straight and beautiful and everything—music playing—everybody craning necks to look at her—the men eating their hearts out with envy. 'Who taketh this woman!' 'That do I, Tomas Beauling, for ever and ever, God bless her, Amen.' 'Who is this woman?' 'She is the woman that everybody has been wanting ever since the beginning of the world, and will go on wanting till the end of the world, and afterward. But Tomas Beauling has got her, and she is going to belong to him for ever and ever and afterward! Oh, you Phylis! . . .{{' "}}

Beauling looked at his watch.

"If I hurry," he said, "perhaps I can get a moment with her before dinner, and—"

He arose, faced the glass, and began

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to destroy white ties. The fourth one proved more facile, and tied to his satisfaction. He surveyed himself.

"Who are you?" he said. And back came the blues.

"It isn't rights" he said. "I mustn't do it I must go away, and never come back. I must go to-night after dinner—now. I can get the German steamer for Gibraltar, catch the ''Caledonia'' for Australia, and be back in the old diggings before the world is a month older. Why didn't I play fair, and tell them in the first place? Why didn't I? But somehow you can't go around doing that. If somebody asks you to lunch, you can't answer, 'I will come with pleasure, if you have no objection to my being a—' It isn't fair. It isn't done. You've got to hide lots of things about yourself—even if you've got nothing that's specially criminal to hide. It isn't criminal being nobody—and somehow it never before seemed criminal to hide the fact. But I see it now. I should have told her father. I said, ever so many years ago,

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'It's what I am, not what I come from, and I'll prove it.' God knows I've tried. Out in the East, where nobody knows who anybody is or cares, it works splendidly—but here, it's so different. Why, if people knew they wouldn't ask me about, they wouldn't let me know their daughters, they would influence their sons against associating with me—here in this free and equal country, where a man's a man for what he is—here where the names of Hamilton and Jefferson are held in great esteem—here where the sins of the fathers are not supposed to be visited upon the children—here's the place to anchor if you want to see pride of descent! And since it is so, I will go away and not bring any troubles of that kind on her. If I haven't been honest before, I'll be honest now—God help me! I'll go away."

He took her letters out of the writing-case and turned them over lovingly. In the same compartment with them was the old photograph of his father and mother. He kept it always near him. He took it

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out now, and laid it beside the letters. It was greatly faded with the years.

"Poor mama!" he said, "I wonder if he will be punished for all the troubles he has brought on you and met I suppose not; it isn't the way of the world. Do you know what I promised to say to him, though! I'm to say—if ever I find him—'One old man was made happy by your sin.' That's the good that you and I have done in the world, mama. One old man was glad we existed. I wish we could talk it all over with him. He was so wise and gentle and just. We are in awful trouble, mama. 'Ohé, mama! Ohé, mama!{{' "}}

Beauling addressed the tall, smoothfaced young man in the picture.

"If ever I find you," he said, "I'll first tell you about the old man you made happy, and then I think I'll tear your head off your shoulders."

He turned to the letters. At first he could see his name on the envelope, and the names of the various places to which they had been sent. The contents of

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each he knew by heart—and soul. Then things began to swim, and for a second or two he was quite blind.

"And ''you'' care for me," he said hoarsely, "and ''I'' have been planning to run ''away!"''

He looked at his watch.

"If I hurry." he said, "perhaps I can see her a moment before dinner."

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{{di|S}}OME ONE knocked. And Beauling turned the photograph face downward.

"Come in," he said.

Dunbar, immaculately dressed, smoking a cigarette, and looking very distinguished, pushed open the door.

"Have you got everything you want, Tom?" he asked.

"Yes, thanks," said Beauling; "everything. But I came very near needing another tie. I did for three."

"You should use Lilac," said Dunbar. "That's what he's for."

"I suppose so," said Beauling; "but, to tell the truth, I'm very much afraid of him."

Dunbar smiled, knocked the ashes from his cigarette, and turned to go.
{{nop}}

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"It's fifteen minutes till dinner," he said, "so don't hurry."

"Please wait," said Beauling. "I want to tell you something."

Dunbar waited, with a quizzical smile.

Beauling slipped into a white waistcoat, and, with it still unbuttoned, turned to Dunbar and faced him, standing veryerect

"It's something I should have told you long ago, Mr. Dunbar," he said. "I've been sailing under false colors, I'm ashamed to say, but I can't do it any longer."

His voice shook a little. This was not the beginning which Dunbar had expected. He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace, and lighted a fresh one.

"Somehow," said Beauling, "you always seemed to take it for granted that I was all right; you never asked me where I came from, who I was, or anything. And I couldn't bear to tell you."

"Do you think it necessary to tell me now?" asked Dunbar, kindly.

"I do," said Beauling. "I should

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have told you long ago." He drew a deep breath. "I don't know who my father was," he announced abruptly.

Dunbar's expression did not change. He stood perfectly still for some moments, as if waiting for Beauling to continue.

"Well?" he said, after a time.

Beauling's eyebrows went up, and he breathed shortly.

"I learned that some time ago," said Dunbar, in a measured voice, "At least," he specified, "a Mr. Rankin of Connecticut, who knew something of your early history, led me to suppose that such was probably the case."

Beauling clenched and unclenched his hands.

"And, in addition to the other things you have done for me," he said, "you didn't let that make any difference!"

"At the time I was told," said Dunbar, "we had learned to like you and believe in you. I won't say it didn't make a difference for a time—but that passed. And, of course, I could not be sure, un-

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til you told me yourself, that it was true."

Beauling looked what he could not say.

"I thought it right," said Dunbar, "to tell Mrs. Dunbar and my daughter what I had heard. Women are more rigorous about such matters than men, and I thought it right to tell them. You are the best judge of what they thought{{' "}} he added, with a faint smile.

Beauling laid his great hands on Dunbar's shoulders.

"I don't know the words," he said—" I don't know the words."

Dunbar freed himself gently.

"When I was a young man," he said, "before I married, I did a great wrong. I have never quite gotten over it. It haunts me sometimes. If anything ever came of it, I don't know. I gave up making inquiries a long time ago. But I often think that perhaps a son of mine, whom I have never seen, has had a hard road to follow in this world. I tell you this," he said, "to show you why I feel about you as I do, Tom."
{{nop}}

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Beauling remained silent.

"After this," said Dunbar, "we will never refer to these matters again. If fbere is a son of mine floating about the world somewhere, I would cut off my right hand sooner than stand in his way. As I do not know that there is, and probably never shall know, I would like to be a friend to you instead."

"God bless you, sir!" said Beauling.

"And I will never stand in your way," said Dunbar.

Beauling regarded the floor for a moment fixedly. Then he raised his head very high.

"I want Phylis, if she will have me," he said.

Dunbar smiled cheerfully.

"That was what I expected you to say in the first place," he said.

"And you won't stand in my way?"

"No."

Dunbar put out his hand. "All that," he said, "rests with Phylis."

"The words!" cried Beauling; "damn

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it, man, the words! I don't know 'em."

Dunbar laughed. Beauling began to fumble with the buttons of his waistcoat. He turned to the dressing-table, and buttoned the top button into the second buttonhole, and so on. The room seemed to him like an orchard in spring. Dunbar watched him in the glass.

"Your fashion of wearing a waistcoat," he said dryly, "might impress a Bedouin, but for a dinner-party of conventional people—"

"What's wrong with it?" said Beauling. "My waistcoat is all right—what's the matter with it?"

"Consider it calmly," said Dunbar.

Beauling endeavored to do so.

"I don't see anything wrong," he said.

"Why, here," said Dunbar. He walked up to Beauling from behind—a little to one side.

"It's—" He paused.

"Well?" said Beauling.

Dunbar did not answer.

Beauling caught a glimpse of Dunbar's

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face in the glass. There was horror on it. His eyes, cast down, were fixed on the back of the photograph.

"What's that?" he said, in a thin, sharp voice.

Beauling began to tremble all over; he did not know why.

"That's a photograph of my father and mother," he said.

Dunbar breathed heavily.

"Why do you look at it like that?" said Beauling. "Why do you?"

Dunbar's voice was unrecognizable.

"Mine was like that," he said.

The silence became terrible in the room.

Beauling, his eyes still on the mirror, saw Dunbar's hand stealing toward the picture. He caught the hand, and thrust it back.

"No," he said; "no!"

"Let me see it," said Dunbar.

"No," said Beauling. He faced about, interposing himself between Dunbar and the picture.

"Why did you say it was like yours?" he said. "Why did you?"
{{nop}}

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Dunbar tried to get himself in hand.

"I—we," he said, and faltered.

"And you thought—you think—"

"Let me see it,{{' "}} cried Dunbar. "Let me see it. I've got to see it—she had one, too."

"Let me think," said Beauling. He tried to fight off the growing conviction. "It can't be you," he began desperately, "or I would have recognized you—it mustn't be you; and yet—I—it's so faded—I—"

"You don't know how I've changed, either," said Dunbar. "Quick, let's see it, and have it over."

"Have it over!" said Beauling, slowly. "Do you know what that would mean to me—Phylis?"

Dunbar choked over something he was trying to say.

"If it should be you," said Beauling, huskily, "it would be too horrible. I will destroy this and go away."

"We have got to know," said Dunbar. "Give it to me."

The two men looked into each other's white and tired faces.
{{nop}}

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Beauling took up the photograph.

"Before I give you this." he said, "I want to thank you for all you have done for me. And if you are my father," he said, "I'm going to tell you that one old man was made happy by your sin. He told me to tell my father that, if I ever found my father. And if you are my father," he said, "it will take away all the chance of happiness that I have in this world, but, for the sake of an old man who loved me and whom I loved, I shall forgive you."

Dunbar took the photograph, and, after a moment's hesitation, turned it over and looked at it. The noise which came from his lips was more like the tittering of a school-girl than anything else.

"It isn't I," he said.
{{dhr}}
{{sc|As}} she was passing the little drawing-room up-stairs, on her way to dinner, Mrs. Dunbar stopped and parted the portieres, with the intention of going in. She changed her mind, drew the portieres together gently, and went downstairs, smiling.
{{nop}}

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Any number of people sat down to dinner with the Dunbars that night. When all were seated, it was observed that two places remained empty.

"My daughter Phylis," explained Mrs. Dunbar, with a deprecating glance at the empty places, "and my future son-in-law are always late."

—

—cov

User:SnowyCinema/P/Tom Beauling

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