“Oh, nothing. I may want him later. And, say!”
“Vell,” again replied Otto.
“Git wise and surprise that little girl of yours with something else—she'll never wear that mantilla. So long,” and he strode out of the store.
Chapter XXIII
The short winter's day had run its course and a soft, aimless snow was falling—each flake a lazy feather, careless of its fate. The store windows were ablaze, and many of the houses on both sides of “The Avenue” were alive with newly kindled gas-jets, the street-lamps shedding their light over a broad highway blocked with slipping teams, their carts crammed to the utmost with holiday freight.
A spirit of good-fellowship and unrestrained joyousness was everywhere. When a team was stalled, two or three men put their shoulders to the wheels; when a horse slipped and fell, a dozen others helped him to his feet. Snowballs, thrown in good humor and received with a laugh, filled the air. New York was getting ready to celebrate the night before New Year's, the maddest night of all the year in old Manhattan, when groups of merrymakers, carrying tin horns and jingling cow-bells, crowd the sidewalks, singing and shouting, forming flying wedges, swooping down on other wedges—strangers all—the whole ending in roars of laughter and “Happy New Year's,” repeated again and again until the next collision.
None of this roused Felix as, with heavy heart, he turned into Kitty's. Of what the morrow would bring forth he dared not think. Father Cruse, he knew, would do what he could to save Barbara, and the British consul—a man he had always avoided—might help. But nothing of all this could lighten his load or relieve his pain. She might be given her freedom for a time, or she might be turned over to one of the reformatories for a term of years—either course meant untold suffering to a woman reared as his wife had been. These mental tortures of the day had burned their way into his brain, as branding-irons burn into flesh, the agony seaming the lines of his face and deep-hollowing the eyes, forming scars that might take years to efface.
As his fingers gripped the knob of Kitty's outside office, shouts of “Happy New Year” rang out from a group of girls showering each other with snowballs.
“Pray God,” he said to himself, “that it be better than the one which is passing,” and stepped inside, to find Kitty in the kitchen.