But while they were on their wedding journey a panic began. Max always remembered afterward that he read of the first gust of misfortune in a Tribune which he bought in the train as they came from Niagara. That was the first gust, but by no means the last. The last? I should think not. Gusts, blasts, hurricanes, and typhoons came. Half the business establishments of the country went to the bottom of the oceans they were cruising on, and among the rest poor Max's own piano-forte factory. Nay, it seemed to Max that every other piano factory he ever heard of had gone under, or was likely to.
So that when the little Elaine was born, and they wanted to leave the boarding-house, which they hated, Max was out of work, and they were as economical as they could be. Still they determined that they would hire rooms somewhere, and keep house. Bertha knew she could manage better than that odious Mrs. Odonto, who polished their teeth so with her horrid steaks. And it ended in their hiring—dog-cheap, because times were so bad—this tumble-down old house on the corner of Madison Avenue and Sprigg Court, which, as you know, had a paint-shop in the garden.
"The truth is," said the agent, "that the Cosmopolitan Railway Company, when they began, hired the barn and fitted it up for a paint-shop. They would leave their cars there to dry. But that was long ago. And no one has wanted to hire these premises till now. You don't happen to know a painter you could underlet the shop to?"
No. Max knew no such painter. But he figured to himself better times, when they would fit up the paint-shop as a sort of summer music-room. And it was pleasant to know that they had something to let, if only any one wanted to hire.
All the same, as he said to me when he began his confession, all his guilt, if it were guilt, all the crime, where there was crime, was "along of the paint-shop," as the reader, if he be patient, shall see.
CHAPTER II.
THE WOMAN BEGAN IT.
"Did you ever notice," said Bertha, at tea one night, "that the rails still run into the paint-shop, just as when the railway people painted their cars there?"
"Why, of course I have," said Max, surprised. "They took up the frog in the avenue, but the old rails were not worth taking."