As soon as he was again alone he stepped to the table. The card and the letter were gone. And still he knew he had not been dreaming. A man swung high in the air was busy painting a sign upon a building not far away, and he was conscious that all through the strange interview he had watched him at work. He had seen him finish one letter and then another, and now if he found him adding the final consonant he would be assured that he could not have been asleep. He looked up and found that he was right. The man had just made the heavy shaded side and was busy putting the little finishing line at the bottom of the letter.
Two men—one of rotund middle age, the other younger but yet not young—came down the steps of the Union Club one day a few weeks later. They met an old man rounding the corner of the Avenue.
“See what you would come to if you had your own way,” said the elder of the two. “There’s old Maskelyne. He’s got everything you’re making yourself wretched to get. Do you want to be like him?”
“No,” said the other. “Then you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He’s a changed man, all within a month.”
“Has his brain or his heart softened?”
“As you look at life,” said the younger. “He has sent for that clever, improvident, gracefully graceless good-fellow of a good-for-nothing, his nephew, him and his pretty-handed, big-eyed wife—he hadn’t seen either of them since they ran away and were married—sent for them and put them in his great, old house and—didn’t you hear Maceration growling about the luck some people have just before we left? He says the nephew will have all the old man’s property.”
“What’s the world coming to?” said the senior, “or what is coming to the world?”
