"You and I have the canine temperament," he would say to Robert, a touch of self-sufficiency mingling with his character, as is not unusual in really benevolent men. "You and I have the canine temperament. Thank the heaven that blessed us, and beware of cats. Two-foot and four-foot, it's all the same. Feline! Catty!" The last word was pronounced with all the explosive scorn which features as incapable of sneering as a hound's could manage to express. Robert saw the great smooth face rise before him now, tinged by time and weather to a pure cherry-wood red, and crowned with luxuriant silver hair fringing out from under the skull-cap. Sometimes, indeed, in the drawn corners of the mouth and the limpid brown eyes, he had read a true affinity to the noble St. Bernard who used to lie stretched upon the mat between them.
"Three o'clock, latest. Here's something special." Emily's rise of tone recalled the young man out of his dream. Elsie was once more deep in her wonder-book and Bessie had slipped down from his knee and run to the window.
"At 2:49 Rosanna Moxom passed away at the hospital, making the sixth victim of the fire. An employe of John Kalinovitch, the furrier, who occupied rooms on the same floor with Carter & Hallowell, has identified the unknown girl as Katie Galuby, a young Polish maiden——"
"Katie Galuby?" cried Mrs. Barlow. "Can that be the girl we know?"
"What about Katie Galuby, mamma?" asked Elsie, looking up.
"She's dead," said mamma, and Elsie's lip quivered at the awful word.
"A young Polish maiden, who stitched pelts in their musky establishment. She had probably run the wrong way," Emily read, "as children will—for Katie was no more than a child, though a workwoman these two years—and so, finding herself with the Carter & Hallowell group, had followed them in their random flight and shared their unhappy fate. This was the girl Patrolman Chandler caught in his arms, who laughed and then fainted away. The smile was still on her lips in death, and her face looked sweet in its expression of happy innocence, though old, prematurely old and wan."
"Perhaps the poor girl is more blessed out of this world," said Mrs. Barlow, whose eyes showed that she herself had not had a fair-weather voyage through life. The Galubys lived in the next block, where there was a colony of poor Poles, and she had often spoken to Katie.
"Listen," cried Emily, reading another paragraph: "Up to 2:30 o'clock no news has been received of Ellen Greeley, the cook in Prof. Arnold's house. Inquiries made at her sister's failed to throw any light on the question of her whereabouts. Dark rumors afloat, however, at a late hour, emanating from an authoritative source and rapidly taking shape, seemed to put her disappearance in close connection with other mysterious facts, to the detriment of a well-known young man's reputation."
"I wonder who that can be?" asked Mrs. Barlow, but before any one could answer a loud murmur in the street interrupted the quiet party.