“Oh, pa’s down at the store,” answered the girl, staring at the visitor.
“When will he be in?” Matt asked, disappointed.
“Oh, not for hours,” said Miss Coble. “Is it anything I can tell him?”
“No, no; I don’t think so,” Matt replied, hesitatingly. “I had better call again this evening.”
The girl lingered silently without closing the door. There was a perceptible pause.
“Yes,” she answered, at last. “I guess you had.”
He raised his hat again and went down the gravel path. At the garden-gate it struck him that he ought to have inquired the address of the store in town, and so saved a second journey. He turned his head, and saw the girl still at the door looking after him. Then it seemed funny to go back.
He shut the gate hastily and pursued his way to town down the muddy road, wondering what he would do next, and how he could cope with life. The thought of the Frenchman brought up the memory of that furniture warehouse in which they had worked together in the days of his boyish dreams. He bent his steps towards it with a vague thought of seeking work there again, but found it had been converted into an emporium for sewing-machines. As he sauntered aimlessly down the street, his eye was caught by a lurid picture in a store window. It represented a shark snapping savagely at a diver upon the bed of the ocean. He smiled at the crude composition, which reminded him of his own early works; then, as he perceived its relation to the stock-in-trade, his smile became broader. Sponge was the staple, and a gigantic delicate sponge, with ornamental spout-holes and fragments of rock adhering realistically to it, was a conspicuous object amid dandy-brushes and spoke-brushes and chamois-leather and glass cases covering rock-work. There were little sponges on a card, and Matt started violently as he read, “Coble’s five-cent sponges.” The mountain had come to Mahomet!
He walked in, crunching over a débris of shells, grit, and sand, and inhaling a pungent saline odor. A veritable mountain of a man towered over him with beetling brows and snowy hair and beard. His paunch protruded imposingly, and his eyes glittered.
“Mr. Coble?” said Matt, inquiringly.