“Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away for a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.”
She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart.
The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown study.
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.”
Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully the high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes fixed on vacancy.
One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features, the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst, brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York press.
Artist, athlete, and thinker, Hugh Conyers had hewed his upward way through the press of bread winners out into the open, and, still sweet-hearted and sincere, he steadily eyed without truckling, New York’s golden luxury, and saw, with a living sympathy, the pathetic tragedies of the side eddies of Gotham’s stiller waters.
From his cheery den, where his sister Sara Conyers’ flowers of art bloomed, the writer looked out unmoved upon the Walpurgis nights of winter society—the mad battles of Wall Street—and the shabby abandon of New York City’s go-as-you-please summer life.
It was only in his faraway summer camp, by the cheery fire, under the friendly stars, or out on the dreaming northern lakes, floating in his beloved birch canoe, that he opened his proud heart to nature—and then, perchance, murmured in his sleep—a name which had haunted his slumbers long.
“So! It’s all over between them!” mused Hugh, as he was swallowed up in a lair of clanking presses and toiling penmen. “Mr. Fred Hathorn has arrived. God help his wife to be! The Belgian granite paving block is as tender as that golden youth’s heart.”