"I have to keep my own rules."
"Let me see it. . . . Oh, now, why not? What was the use of either of us explaining if--if----?"
But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack. "Now," he said, "'tis Mr. Chester's logic that fails." Yet as he turned to a customer he let Chester take it down.
"My job requires me," the youth said, "to study character. Let's see what a grand'mère of a 'tite-fille, situated so and so, will do."
Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk door. As he returned, Chester, rolling map and magazine together, said:
"It's getting dark. No, don't make a light, it's your closing time and I've a strict engagement. Here's a deposit for this magazine; a fifty. It's all I have--oh, yes, take it, we'll trade back to-morrow. You must keep your own rules and I must read this thing before I touch my bed."
"Even the first few lines absorb you?"
"No, far from it. Look here." Chester read out: "'Now, Maud,' said my uncle--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book pose?"
"It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so."
"'Now, Maud,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the evening's later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down with the story. "And so you were grand'mère to our Royal Street miracle. And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older. Well, 'Now, Maud,' for my absorption!"