The house is still to let.
Of Course—Of Course Not.
BY HARRY M. PECK.
They sat, side by side, on a big hearth-rug, gazing into the glowing coals. The one was a young man, of perhaps twenty-eight, and the other an old dog, of perhaps ten. That’s not a criticism on the poverty of the English language. It simply shows how much more a dog can “get out,” or perhaps “put into,” ten years than a man.
They sat there, anyway. Young or old. Young and old. And they gazed into the coals. And the young one blew great clouds of smoke out of a fragrant briarwood at the old one. But the old one did not mind. He was acclimated.
It was in the cozy bachelor apartments of Neil Richards. Neil was a fellow who had succeeded, by dint of presumable study, money, and late nights, in getting through college in a commendable manner, seven years before. Since that time he had been engaged in the financial business. Not exactly as a legitimate broker; nor as a negotiator of loans; nor again as a pawnbroker; but in that pleasanter line which on a business letter-head—if he had owned such a thing—would have been expressed something like this: “Neil Richards, Income Spender, Pleasant Street, Easyville.” Anyway, he had been traveling, intermittently, to improve himself, as the phrase goes, since the day he calmly, and with the most approved senioric gravity, tucked a sheepskin under his arm and discarded his cap and gown.
But, after his latest peripatetic streak, he was back again, at last, in New York, in his old rooms, in his favorite seat on the hearth-rug, with his dog beside him, and—in love. The fellows at the club had said for several weeks past, as Richards would excuse himself, get up, and go out about nine o’clock evenings: “Funny about Neil, isn’t it? He leaves us every night at nine o’clock, and goes home, and they say he sits down and talks to that old dog, General, of his till midnight. Guess he must be in love.”