A few days after determining to keep on he asked for a half-day off to humor a headache. He was allowed an afternoon's leave.
On the way down to the ocean beach, where he hoped to soothe his palpitating cerebellum, he called at the Brooklyn room and found two letters and a telegram awaiting him. They had been forwarded by Sam, who had scribbled on the back of the telegram: "I knew you would have it in a few hours or I would have re-despatched the message." Evan smiled at his mother's anxiety—a letter had gone to her explaining everything; he had told her he was afraid his father would want to fight the bank in the courts, so he had kept the matter quiet until another position turned up. "No one ever wins in a suit against the bank," he said, "and Dad needs his money."
The cheque from home for fifty dollars looked good to Evan, but he hesitated before accepting it. Suddenly, however, he recollected a few little Ontario debts, and slipping the cheque in his pocket he thought what an unbusinesslike father he had. He sent a special letter of thanks, just as he would have done to any benefactor; he was not of the persuasion that everything is coming to the man who happens to be a son.
As a child saves the best bite of cake till the last, the New York clerk stowed Frankie's letter in his pocket until he reached Coney Island. He opened it as he sat on the sand, not far away from a group of attractive girls. Frankie's mention of Perry caused Evan to take note of a chilly breeze that was blowing over the surf. When the letter persisted and persisted in Porter, he suddenly thought the sun was mighty hot for June.
"Let her have him," the reader muttered; "she's welcome to him!"
Evan tried to make himself believe he had meant to say: "Let him have her," but that was not what he had said, and he knew it. He knew, too, that he could not coax himself to say it.
"She makes me mad," he muttered again; "what does she see in that mutt? Confound my head, what's the matter with it, anyway?"
Tearing the letter to bits, he ran into the surf. The girls had been watching him read and had been laughing over the expression on his face. They followed him into the water, and one of them managed to slip over the ropes beside him. The others made a fuss; and, not being used to swimming flirtations, Evan thought a real accident had happened. He bravely swam under the rope and rescued the water-nymph. An hour later, when they were all acquainted, he discovered that she could out-do him thrice over as a swimmer. But he was glad to know somebody in big, busy New York, and Ethel Harris was both pretty and smart.
Thus it was that the ex-bankclerk came to pass over Frankie Arling's letter, which had hurt him, and to take an interest in the pleasures of the present. Frankie and Perry, like the Past, were gone into eclipse.
In the course of months Evan became fairly familiar with New York, and with Miss Harris. The city stood scrutiny, and the girl—she was mighty fine. There was this difference between Ethel and New York, however: she was fathomable, as a girl should not be, and the city was not. Madison Square always reminded Evan of a dream he had dreamt in every fever of childhood—a nightmare in which a great wheel ran smoothly and little wheels crookedly; ran until the sleeper's brain was ready to burst with a sort of frenzy.