“Oh, Mumsey!” called Ethel. “Do come and look at Scoopie. He’s doing all his tricks by himself, just as if somebody was telling him to do them.”
The two looked from a window, and saw the little dog sit up and play dead and roll over—all very joyously—and jump as if through circled arms. Then they saw his tail droop and his head droop and his left hind leg begin to scratch furiously at his ribs. He always had to do that when anyone scratched his back in a particular place.
When Derrick returned to the Place of the wonderful lights and shadows he was very unhappy and he knew that he must always be unhappy.
“Instead of coming to this Place,” he said to himself, “knowing what I know now, I might just as well have gone to Hell.”
A voice, sardonic and on the verge of laughter, answered him.
SHADOWED
By MARY SYNON
From Red Book
ALL the way down from the Capitol, Stroude knew that he was being followed. From the moment he had come out of the Senate office building upon the plaza, fragrant with forsythia in the March moonlight, he had been conscious of the man who trailed his sauntering footsteps. He had led him down a winding way past the Marshall statue and into the deserted wideness of Pennsylvania Avenue. He had thought to lose him when he stepped into the lobby of a big hotel, pausing for a word there with men he knew, men who made their greetings casual or portentous, according to their knowledge of the turning of the inner wheels of Washington; but he found the other man some twenty paces behind him as he crossed Lafayette Square, and his amused acceptance of the situation curdled to annoyance at the possibility of having to deal with an irresponsible crank determined on an interview.
The day had been more than ordinarily difficult, one of the hardest Stroude had known since the turmoiled times of war. He had suffered under the sense of impending crisis knowing that his future hung on to-morrow’s balance; and his temper, always drawn like a taut bow, had been ready to snap a hundred times through the afternoon’s battle in the Senate chamber. Now, at the doorway of his house, that limestone palace of Georgian severity which loomed in stately classicism among the older residences of the neighbourhood, he poised the arrow of his wrath as he turned to confront the man behind him. “What do you want?” he snapped at him.
The man came nearer. By the dim light of the hall lantern Stroude saw his shambling listlessness, and his hand went to his pocket with a thought of relief that the other sought only alms. The man, seeing the gesture, put up his hand arrestingly. “Remember me?” he inquired, almost too nonchalantly. His voice for all its soft slurring of the consonants, was threaded with a fibre of steel which edged the menace of his quiet poise.