Rosenstein’s heart nearly stopped beating. Upon his ears fell a strange noise of scraping and tearing that came from the doorway of his house.
“Wh-wh-what is it?” he asked, feebly. His wife smiled.
“The paper-hangers are already at work,” she said, joyfully. “They said you insisted that all the work should be finished in one day, and they’ve sent twenty men here.”
Mr. Rosenstein sank wearily down upon the steps. The power of speech had left him. Likewise the power of thought. His brain felt like a maelstrom of chaotic, incoherent images. He felt that he was losing his mind. A brisk-looking young man, with a roll of red wall-paper in his hand, came down the steps and doffed his hat to Rosenstein.
“Good-morning!” he cried, cheerfully. (The salutation “Good-morning” was beginning to go through Rosenstein like a knife each time he heard it.) “I did it. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did. I tell you, sir, there isn’t another paper-hanger in the city who could fill a job like that at such short notice. Every single room in the house! And red paper, too, which has to be handled so carefully, and makes the work take so much longer. But the job will be finished to-night, sir.”
He walked off with the light tread and proud mien of a man who has accomplished something. Rosenstein looked after him bewildered. Then he turned to his wife, but when he saw the smile and the happy look that lit up her face he turned away and sighed. How could he tell her?
“My love,” said Mrs. Rosenstein, after a long pause, “promise me one thing and I will be happy as long as I live.”
Rosenstein was silent. In a vague way he was wondering if this promise was based upon some deed of yesterday that had not yet been revealed to him.
“Promise me,” his wife went on, “that, no matter what happens, you will never become a drinker again.”
Rosenstein sat bolt upright. He tried to speak. A hundred different words and phrases crowded to his lips, struggling for utterance. He became purple with suppressed excitement. In a wild endeavour to utter that promise so forcibly, so emphatically, and so fiercely as not only to assure his wife, but to relieve his suffering feelings, Rosenstein could only sputter incoherently. Then, suddenly realising the futility of the endeavour, and feeling that his whole vocabulary was inadequate to express the vehemence of his emotion, he gurgled helplessly: