“Here I go, day after day,” persisted Richling, extending his arm and pointing indefinitely through the window.
“No, no, you don’t, John,” cried Mary, with an effort at gayety; “you don’t go by the window, John; you go by the door.” She pulled his arm down tenderly.
“I go by the alley,” said John. Silence followed. The young pair contrived to force a little laugh, and John made an apologetic move.
“Doctor,” he exclaimed, with an air of pleasantry, “the whole town’s asleep!—sound asleep, like a negro in the sunshine! There isn’t work for one man in fifty!” He ended tremulously. Mary looked at him with dropped face but lifted eyes, handling the fan, whose rent she had made worse.
“Richling, my friend,”—the Doctor had never used that term before,—“what does your Italian money-maker say to the idea?”
Richling gave an Italian shrug and his own pained laugh.
“Exactly! Why, Mr. Richling, you’re on an island now,—an island in mid-ocean. Both of you!” He waved his hands toward the two without lifting his head from the back of the easy-chair, where he had dropped it.
“What do you mean, Doctor?”
“Mean? Isn’t my meaning plain enough? I mean you’re too independent. You know very well, Richling, that you’ve started out in life with some fanciful feud against the ‘world.’ What it is I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s not the sort that religion requires. You’ve told this world—you remember you said it to me once—that if it will go one road you’ll go another. You’ve forgotten that, mean and stupid and bad as your fellow-creatures are, they’re your brothers and sisters, and that they have claims on you as such, and that you have claims on them as such.—Cozumel! You’re there now! Has a friend no rights? I don’t know your immediate relatives, and I say nothing about them”—
John gave a slight start, and Mary looked at him suddenly.