But Katharine and John Ralston followed less frequented paths, crossing Broadway from Clinton Place east, and striking past Astor Place and Lafayette Place—where the Crowdies lived—by Stuyvesant Street eastwards to Avenue A and Tompkins Square. And there, too, the spring was busy, blurring everything with green. Men were getting the benches out of the kiosk on the north side where they are stacked away all winter, and others were repairing the band stand with its shabby white dome, and everywhere there were children, rising as it were from the earth to meet the soft air—rising as the sparkling little air bubbles rise in champagne, to be free at last—hundreds of children, perhaps a thousand, in the vast area which many a New Yorker has not seen twice in his life, out at play in the light of the westering sun. They stared innocently as Katharine and Ralston passed through their midst, and held their breath a moment at the sight of a real lady and gentleman. All the little girls over ten years old looked at Katharine’s clothes and approved of them, and all the boys looked at John Ralston’s face to see whether he would be the right sort of young person to whom to address an ironical remark, but decided that he was not.
“There goes a son of a gamboleer,” observed one small chap on roller skates, as he looked after John. “He’s fly.”
“You bet! And his girl, she knows it,” replied his companion, sharing in his admiration.
“Your dad’s new coat’s that shape,” said the first. “But ’taint made that way. Fifth Av’nue, that is! Bet?”
“Lemme be!” retorted the other. “Botherin’ me ’bout dad’s coat. Mine’s better’n yours, anyhow.”
“Take a reef in your lip, Johnny, or I’ll sit on it!”
Thereupon they fought without the slightest hesitation. But Katharine and John Ralston went on, and crossed the great square and left it by the southeast corner, from which a quiet street leads across the remaining lettered avenues to an enormous timber yard at the water’s edge, a bad neighbourhood at night, and the haunt of the class generically termed dock rats, a place of murder and sudden death by no means unfrequently, but by day as quiet and safe as any one could wish.
“I don’t know what to do, Jack,” Katharine said, as they walked along. “The idea of that other will haunts me, and I lie awake thinking of it at night.”
“Don’t do that,” laughed Ralston. “It isn’t worth while. Besides, it wouldn’t make so much difference if it were found.”
“The Brights would get their share—as much as they ought to expect—instead of getting nothing. That’s the principal thing. But papa wouldn’t like it at all. As things are now, he’ll probably have all grandpapa’s share when grandpapa dies. I suppose he’ll have the management of it as it is. But if the old will were found, and were legal, you know—why then papa never could possibly have anything but the income of half my share. He wouldn’t like that.”