T. TEMBAROM

The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know what the “T.” stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in reply to questions was: “It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter have a' 'nitial, ain't you?” His name was, in fact, an almost inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became “Temp.” His surname was Barom, so he was at once “Temp Barom.” In the natural tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled itself into “Tembarom,” and there remained. By much less inevitable processes have surnames evolved themselves as centuries rolled by. Tembarom liked it, and soon almost forgot he had ever been called anything else.

His education really began when he was ten years old. At that time his mother died of pneumonia, contracted by going out to sew, at seventy-five cents a day, in shoes almost entirely without soles, when the remains of a blizzard were melting in the streets. As, after her funeral, there remained only twenty-five cents in the shabby bureau which was one of the few articles furnishing the room in the tenement in which they lived together, Tembarom sleeping on a cot, the world spread itself before him as a place to explore in search of at least one meal a day. There was nothing to do but to explore it to the best of his ten-year-old ability.

His father had died two years before his mother, and Tembarom had vaguely felt it a relief. He had been a resentful, domestically tyrannical immigrant Englishman, who held in contempt every American trait and institution. He had come over to better himself, detesting England and the English because there was “no chance for a man there,” and, transferring his dislikes and resentments from one country to another, had met with no better luck than he had left behind him. This he felt to be the fault of America, and his family, which was represented solely by Tembarom and his mother, heard a good deal about it, and also, rather contradictorily, a good deal about the advantages and superiority of England, to which in the course of six months he became gloomily loyal. It was necessary, in fact, for him to have something with which to compare the United States unfavorably. The effect he produced on Tembarom was that of causing him, when he entered the public school round the corner, to conceal with determination verging on duplicity the humiliating fact that if he had not been born in Brooklyn he might have been born in England. England was not popular among the boys in the school. History had represented the country to them in all its tyrannical rapacity and bloodthirsty oppression of the humble free-born. The manly and admirable attitude was to say, “Give me liberty or give me death”—and there was the Fourth of July.

Though Tembarom and his mother had been poor enough while his father lived, when he died the returns from his irregular odd jobs no longer came in to supplement his wife's sewing, and add an occasional day or two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow, sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into kindling-wood, more than once he “minded” a baby when its mother left its perambulator outside a store. But at eight or nine years of age one's pay is in proportion to one's size. Tembarom, however, had neither his father's bitter eye nor his mother's discouraged one. Something different from either had been reincarnated in him from some more cheerful past. He had an alluring grin instead—a grin which curled up his mouth and showed his sound, healthy, young teeth,—a lot of them,—and people liked to see them.

At the beginning of the world it is only recently reasonable to suppose human beings were made with healthy bodies and healthy minds. That of course was the original scheme of the race. It would not have been worth while to create a lot of things aimlessly ill made. A journeyman carpenter would not waste his time in doing it, if he knew any better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit he had done it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs of incompetence. Logically considered, the race was built straight and clean and healthy and happy. How, since then, it has developed in multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness and proportions, I am, singularly enough, not entirely competent to explain with any degree of satisfactory detail. But it cannot be truthfully denied that this has rather generally happened. There are human beings who are not beautiful, there are those who are not healthy, there are those who hate people and things with much waste of physical and mental energy, there are people who are not unwilling to do others an ill turn by word or deed, and there are those who do not believe that the original scheme of the race was ever a decent one.

This is all abnormal and unintelligent, even the not being beautiful, and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a temptation to listen to an internal hint that the whole thing is aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as it leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting to call to mind a certain undeniable fact which ought to loom up much larger in our philosophical calculations. No one has ever made a collection of statistics regarding the enormous number of perfectly sane, kind, friendly, decent creatures who form a large proportion of any mass of human beings anywhere and everywhere—people who are not vicious or cruel or depraved, not as a result of continual self-control, but simply because they do not want to be, because it is more natural and agreeable to be exactly the opposite things; people who do not tell lies because they could not do it with any pleasure, and would, on the contrary, find the exertion an annoyance and a bore; people whose manners and morals are good because their natural preference lies in that direction. There are millions of them who in most essays on life and living are virtually ignored because they do none of the things which call forth eloquent condemnation or brilliant cynicism. It has not yet become the fashion to record them. When one reads a daily newspaper filled with dramatic elaborations of crimes and unpleasantness, one sometimes wishes attention might be called to them—to their numbers, to their decencies, to their normal lack of any desire to do violence and their equally normal disposition to lend a hand. One is inclined to feel that the majority of persons do not believe in their existence. But if an accident occurs in the street, there are always several of them who appear to spring out of the earth to give human sympathy and assistance; if a national calamity, physical or social, takes place, the world suddenly seems full of them. They are the thousands of Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons who, massed together, send food to famine-stricken countries, sustenance to earthquake-devastated regions, aid to wounded soldiers or miners or flood-swept homelessness. They are the ones who have happened naturally to continue to grow straight and carry out the First Intention. They really form the majority; if they did not, the people of the earth would have eaten one another alive centuries ago. But though this is surely true, a happy cynicism totally disbelieves in their existence. When a combination of circumstances sufficiently dramatic brings one of them into prominence, he is either called an angel or a fool. He is neither. He is only a human creature who is normal.

After this manner Tembarom was wholly normal. He liked work and rejoiced in good cheer, when he found it, however attenuated its form. He was a good companion, and even at ten years old a practical person. He took his loose coppers from the old bureau drawer, and remembering that he had several times helped Jake Hutchins to sell his newspapers, he went forth into the world to find and consult him as to the investment of his capital.

“Where are you goin', Tem?” a woman who lived in the next room said when she met him on the stairs. “What you goin' to do?”

“I'm goin' to sell newspapers if I can get some with this,” he replied, opening his hand to show her the extent of his resources.

She was almost as poor as he was, but not quite. She looked him over curiously for a moment, and then fumbled in her pocket. She drew out two ten-cent pieces and considered them, hesitating. Then she looked again at him. That normal expression in his nice ten-year-old eyes had its suggestive effect.

“You take this,” she said, handing him the two pieces. “It'll help you to start.”

“I'll bring it back, ma'am,” said Tem. “Thank you, Mis' Hullingworth.”

In about two weeks' time he did bring it back. That was the beginning. He lived through all the experiences a small boy waif and stray would be likely to come in contact with. The abnormal class treated him ill, and the normal class treated him well. He managed to get enough food to eat to keep him from starvation. Sometimes he slept under a roof and much oftener out-of-doors. He preferred to sleep out-of-doors more than half of the year, and the rest of the time he did what he could. He saw and learned many strange things, but was not undermined by vice because he unconsciously preferred decency. He sold newspapers and annexed any old job which appeared on the horizon. The education the New York streets gave him was a liberal one. He became accustomed to heat and cold and wet weather, but having sound lungs and a tough little body combined with the normal tendencies already mentioned, he suffered no more physical deterioration than a young Indian would suffer. After selling newspapers for two years he got a place as “boy” in a small store. The advance signified by steady employment was inspiring to his energies. He forged ahead, and got a better job and better pay as he grew older. By the time he was fifteen he shared a small bedroom with another boy. In whatsoever quarter he lived, friends seemed sporadic. Other boy's congregated about him. He did not know he had any effect at all, but his effect, in fact, was rather like that of a fire in winter or a cool breeze in summer. It was natural to gather where it prevailed.

There came a time when he went to a night class to learn stenography. Great excitement had been aroused among the boys he knew best by a rumor that there were “fellows” who could earn a hundred dollars a week “writing short.” Boyhood could not resist the florid splendor of the idea. Four of them entered the class confidently looking forward to becoming the recipients of four hundred a month in the course of six weeks. One by one they dropped off, until only Tembarom remained, slowly forging ahead. He had never meant anything else but to get on in the world—to get as far as he could. He kept at his “short,” and by the time he was nineteen it helped him to a place in a newspaper office. He took dictation from a nervous and harried editor, who, when he was driven to frenzy by overwork and incompetencies, found that the long-legged, clean youth with the grin never added fuel to the flame of his wrath. He was a common young man, who was not marked by special brilliancy of intelligence, but he had a clear head and a good temper, and a queer aptitude for being able to see himself in the other man's shoes—his difficulties and moods. This ended in his being tried with bits of new work now and then. In an emergency he was once sent out to report the details of a fire. What he brought back was usable, and his elation when he found he had actually “made good” was ingenuous enough to spur Galton, the editor, into trying him again.

To Tembarom this was a magnificent experience. The literary suggestion implied by being “on a newspaper” was more than he had hoped for. If you have sold newspapers, and slept in a barrel or behind a pile of lumber in a wood-yard, to report a fire in a street-car shed seems a flight of literature. He applied himself to the careful study of newspapers—their points of view, their style of phrasing. He believed them to be perfect. To attain ease in expressing himself in their elevated language he felt to be the summit of lofty ambition. He had no doubts of the exaltation of his ideal. His respect and confidence almost made Galton cry at times, because they recalled to him days when he had been nineteen and had regarded New York journalists with reverence. He liked Tembarom more and more. It actually soothed him to have him about, and he fell into giving him one absurd little chance after another. When he brought in “stuff” which bore too evident marks of utter ignorance, he actually touched it up and used it, giving him an enlightening, ironical hint or so. Tembarom always took the hints with gratitude. He had no mistaken ideas of his own powers. Galton loomed up before him a sort of god, and though the editor was a man with a keen, though wearied, brain and a sense of humor, the situation was one naturally productive of harmonious relations. He was of the many who unknowingly came in out of the cold and stood in the glow of Tembarom's warm fire, or took refuge from the heat in his cool breeze. He did not know of the private, arduous study of journalistic style, and it was not unpleasing to see that the nice young cub was gradually improving. Through pure modest fear or ridicule, Tembarom kept to himself his vaulting ambition. He practised reports of fires, weddings, and accidents in his hall bedroom.

A hall bedroom in a third-rate boarding-house is not a cheerful place, but when Tembarom vaguely felt this, he recalled the nights spent in empty trucks and behind lumber-piles, and thought he was getting spoiled by luxury. He told himself that he was a fellow who always had luck. He did not know, neither did any one else, that his luck would have followed him if he had lived in a coal-hole. It was the concomitant of his normal build and outlook on life. Mrs. Bowse, his hard-worked landlady, began by being calmed down by his mere bearing when he came to apply for his room and board. She had a touch of grippe, and had just emerged from a heated affray with a dirty cook, and was inclined to battle when he presented himself. In a few minutes she was inclined to battle no longer. She let him have the room. Cantankerous restrictions did not ruffle him.

“Of course what you say GOES,” he said, giving her his friendly grin. “Any one that takes boarders has GOT to be careful. You're in for a bad cold, ain't you?”

“I've got grippe again, that's what I've got,” she almost snapped.

“Did you ever try Payson's 'G. Destroyer'? G stands for grippe, you know. Catchy name, ain't it? They say the man that invented it got ten thousand dollars for it. 'G. Destroyer.' You feel like you have to find out what it means when you see it up on a boarding. I'm just over grippe myself, and I've got half a bottle in my pocket. You carry it about with you, and swallow one every half-hour. You just try it. It set me right in no time.”

He took the bottle out of his waistcoat pocket and handed it to her. She took it and turned it over.

“You're awful good-natured,”—She hesitated,—“but I ain't going to take your medicine. I ought to go and get some for myself. How much does it cost?”

“It's on the bottle; but it's having to get it for yourself that's the matter. You won't have time, and you'll forget it.”

“That's true enough,” said Mrs. Bowse, looking at him sharply. “I guess you know something about boarding-houses.”

“I guess I know something about trying to earn three meals a day—or two of them. It's no merry jest, whichever way you do it.”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER II

When he took possession of his hall bedroom the next day and came down to his first meal, all the boarders looked at him interestedly. They had heard of the G. Destroyer from Mrs. Bowse, whose grippe had disappeared. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger looked at him because they were about his own age, and shared a hall bedroom on his floor; the young woman from the notion counter in a down-town department store looked at him because she was a young woman; the rest of the company looked at him because a young man in a hall bedroom might or might not be noisy or objectionable, and the incident of the G. Destroyer sounded good-natured. Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the stout and discontented Englishman from Manchester, looked him over because the mere fact that he was a new-comer had placed him by his own rash act in the position of a target for criticism. Mr. Hutchinson had come to New York because he had been told that he could find backers among profuse and innumerable multi-millionaires for the invention which had been the haunting vision of his uninspiring life. He had not been met with the careless rapture which had been described to him, and he was becoming violently antagonistic to American capital and pessimistic in his views of American institutions. Like Tembarom's father, he was the resentful Englishman.

“I don't think much o' that chap,” he said in what he considered an undertone to his daughter, who sat beside him and tried to manage that he should not be infuriated by waiting for butter and bread and second helpings. A fine, healthy old feudal feeling that servants should be roared at if they did not “look sharp” when he wanted anything was one of his salient characteristics.

“Wait a bit, Father; we don't know anything about him yet,” Ann Hutchinson murmured quietly, hoping that his words had been lost in the clatter of knives and forks and dishes.

As Tembarom had taken his seat, he had found that, when he looked across the table, he looked directly at Miss Hutchinson; and before the meal ended he felt that he was in great good luck to be placed opposite an object of such singular interest. He knew nothing about “types,” but if he had been of those who do, he would probably have said to himself that she was of a type apart. As it was, he merely felt that she was of a kind one kept looking at whether one ought to or not. She was a little thing of that exceedingly light slimness of build which makes a girl a childish feather-weight. Few girls retain it after fourteen or fifteen. A wind might supposably have blown her away, but one knew it would not, because she was firm and steady on her small feet. Ordinary strength could have lifted her with one hand, and would have been tempted to do it. She had a slim, round throat, and the English daisy face it upheld caused it to suggest to the mind the stem of a flower. The roundness of her cheek, in and out of which totally unexpected dimples flickered, and the forget-me-not blueness of her eyes, which were large and rather round also, made her look like a nice baby of singularly serious and observing mind. She looked at one as certain awe-inspiring things in perambulators look at one—with a far and clear silence of gaze which passes beyond earthly obstacles and reserves a benign patience with follies. Tembarom felt interestedly that one really might quail before it, if one had anything of an inferior quality to hide. And yet it was not a critical gaze at all. She wore a black dress with a bit of white collar, and she had so much soft, red hair that he could not help recalling one or two women who owned the same quantity and seemed able to carry it only as a sort of untidy bundle. Hers looked entirely under control, and yet was such a wonder of burnished fullness that it tempted the hand to reach out and touch it. It became Tembarom's task during the meal to keep his eyes from turning too often toward it and its owner.

If she had been a girl who took things hard, she might have taken her father very hard indeed. But opinions and feelings being solely a matter of points of view, she was very fond of him, and, regarding him as a sacred charge and duty, took care of him as though she had been a reverentially inclined mother taking care of a boisterous son. When his roar was heard, her calm little voice always fell quietly on indignant ears the moment it ceased. It was her part in life to act as a palliative: her mother, whose well-trained attitude toward the ruling domestic male was of the early Victorian order, had lived and died one. A nicer, warmer little woman had never existed. Joseph Hutchinson had adored and depended on her as much as he had harried her. When he had charged about like a mad bull because he could not button his collar, or find the pipe he had mislaid in his own pocket, she had never said more than “Now, Mr. Hutchinson,” or done more than leave her sewing to button the collar with soothing fingers, and suggest quietly that sometimes he DID chance to carry his pipe about with him. She was of the class which used to call its husband by a respectful surname. When she died she left him as a sort of legacy to her daughter, spending the last weeks of her life in explaining affectionately all that “Father” needed to keep him quiet and make him comfortable.

Little Ann had never forgotten a detail, and had even improved upon some of them, as she happened to be cleverer than her mother, and had, indeed, a far-seeing and clear young mind of her own. She had been called “Little Ann” all her life. This had held in the first place because her mother's name had been Ann also, and after her mother's death the diminutive had not fallen away from her. People felt it belonged to her not because she was especially little, though she was a small, light person, but because there was an affectionate humor in the sound of it.

Despite her hard needs, Mrs. Bowse would have faced the chance of losing two boarders rather than have kept Mr. Joseph Hutchinson but for Little Ann. As it was, she kept them both, and in the course of three months the girl was Little Ann to almost every one in the house. Her normalness took the form of an instinct which amounted to genius for seeing what people ought to have, and in some occult way filling in bare or trying places.

“She's just a wonder, that girl,” Mrs. Bowse said to one boarder after another.

“She's just a wonder,” Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger murmured to each other in rueful confidence, as they tilted their chairs against the wall of their hall bedroom and smoked. Each of the shabby and poverty-stricken young men had of course fallen hopelessly in love with her at once. This was merely human and inevitable, but realizing in the course of a few weeks that she was too busy taking care of her irritable, boisterous old Manchester father, and everybody else, to have time to be made love to even by young men who could buy new boots when the old ones had ceased to be water-tight, they were obliged to resign themselves to the, after all, comforting fact that she became a mother to them, not a sister. She mended their socks and sewed buttons on for them with a firm frankness which could not be persuaded into meaning anything more sentimental than a fixed habit of repairing anything which needed it, and which, while at first bewildering in its serenity, ended by reducing the two youths to a dust of devotion.

“She's a wonder, she is,” they sighed when at every weekend they found their forlorn and scanty washing resting tidily on their bed.

In the course of a week, more or less, Tembarom's feeling for her would have been exactly that of his two hall-bedroom neighbors, but that his nature, though a practical one, was not inclined to any supine degree of resignation. He was a sensible youth, however, and gave no trouble. Even Joseph Hutchinson, who of course resented furiously any “nonsense” of which his daughter and possession was the object, became sufficiently mollified by his good spirits and ready good nature to refrain from open conversational assault.

“I don't mind that chap as much as I did at first,” he admitted reluctantly to Little Ann one evening after a good dinner and a comfortable pipe. “He's not such a fool as he looks.”

Tembarom was given, as Little Ann was, to seeing what people wanted. He knew when to pass the mustard and other straying condiments. He picked up things which dropped inconveniently, he did not interrupt the remarks of his elders and betters, and several times when he chanced to be in the hall, and saw Mr. Hutchinson, in irritable, stout Englishman fashion, struggling into his overcoat, he sprang forward with a light, friendly air and helped him. 'He did not do it with ostentatious politeness or with the manner of active youth giving generous aid to elderly avoirdupois. He did it as though it occurred to him as a natural result of being on the spot.

It took Mrs. Bowse and her boarding-house less than a week definitely to like him. Every night when he sat down to dinner he brought news with him-news and jokes and new slang. Newspaper-office anecdote and talk gave a journalistic air to the gathering when he was present, and there was novelty in it. Soon every one was intimate with him, and interested in what he was doing. Galton's good-natured patronage of him was a thing to which no one was indifferent. It was felt to be the right thing in the right place. When he came home at night it became the custom to ask him questions as to the bits of luck which befell him. He became “T. T.” instead of Mr. Tembarom, except to Joseph Hutchinson and his 'daughter. Hutchinson called him Tembarom, but Little Ann said “Mr. Tembarom” with quaint frequency when she spoke to him.

“Landed anything to-day, T. T.?” some one would ask almost every evening, and the interest in his relation of the day's adventures increased from week to week. Little Ann never asked questions and seldom made comments, but she always listened attentively. She had gathered, and guessed from what she had gathered, a rather definite idea of what his hard young life had been. He did not tell pathetic stories about himself, but he and Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger had become fast friends, and the genial smoking of cheap tobacco in hall bedrooms tends to frankness of relation, and the various ways in which each had found himself “up against it” in the course of their brief years supplied material for anecdotal talk.

“But it's bound to be easier from now on,” he would say. “I've got the 'short' down pretty fine—not fine enough to make big money, but enough to hold down a job with Galton. He's mighty good to me. If I knew more, I believe he'd give me a column to take care of—Up-town Society column perhaps. A fellow named Biker's got it. Twenty per. Goes on a bust twice a month, the fool. Gee! I wish I had his job!”

Mrs. Bowse's house was provided with a parlor in which her boarders could sit in the evening when so inclined. It was a fearsome room, which, when the dark, high-ceilinged hall was entered, revealed depths of dingy gloom which appeared splashed in spots with incongruous brilliancy of color. This effect was produced by richly framed department-store chromo lithographs on the walls, aided by lurid cushion-covers, or “tidies” representing Indian maidens or chieftains in full war paint, or clusters of poppies of great boldness of hue. They had either been Christmas gifts bestowed upon Mrs. Bowse or department-store bargains of her own selection, purchased with thrifty intent. The red-and-green plush upholstered walnut chairs arid sofa had been acquired by her when the bankruptcy of a neighboring boarding-house brought them within her means. They were no longer very red or very green, and the cheerfully hopeful design of the tidies and cushions had been to conceal worn places and stains. The mantelpiece was adorned by a black-walnut-and-gold-framed mirror, and innumerable vases of the ornate ninety-eight-cents order. The centerpiece held a large and extremely soiled spray of artificial wistaria. The end of the room was rendered attractive by a tent-like cozy-corner built of savage weapons and Oriental cotton stuffs long ago become stringy and almost leprous in hue. The proprietor of the bankrupt boarding-house had been “artistic.” But Mrs. Bowse was a good-enough soul whose boarders liked her and her house, and when the gas was lighted and some one played “rag-time” on the second-hand pianola, they liked the parlor.

Little Ann did not often appear in it, but now and then she came down with her bit of sewing,—she always had a “bit of sewing,”—and she sat in the cozy-corner listening to the talk or letting some one confide troubles to her. Sometimes it was the New England widow, Mrs. Peck, who looked like a spinster school-ma'am, but who had a married son with a nice wife who lived in Harlem and drank heavily. She used to consult with Little Ann as to the possible wisdom of putting a drink deterrent privately in his tea. Sometimes it was Mr. Jakes, a depressed little man whose wife had left him, for no special reason he could discover. Oftenest perhaps it was Julius Steinberger or Jim Bowles who did their ingenuous best to present themselves to her as energetic, if not successful, young business men, not wholly unworthy of attention and always breathing daily increasing devotion. Sometimes it was Tembarom, of whom her opinion had never been expressed, but who seemed to have made friends with her. She liked to hear about the newspaper office and Mr. Galton, and never was uninterested in his hopes of “making good.” She seemed to him the wisest and most direct and composed person he had ever known. She spoke with the broad, flat, friendly Manchester accent, and when she let drop a suggestion, it carried a delightfully sober conviction with it, because what she said was generally a revelation of logical mental argument concerning details she had gathered through her little way of listening and saying nothing whatever.

“If Mr. Biker drinks, he won't keep his place,” she said to Tembarom one night. “Perhaps you might get it yourself, if you persevere.”

Tembarom reddened a little. He really reddened through joyous excitement.

“Say, I didn't know you knew a thing about that,” he answered. “You're a regular wonder. You scarcely ever say anything, but the way you get on to things gets me.”

“Perhaps if I talked more I shouldn't notice as much,” she said, turning her bit of sewing round and examining it. “I never was much of a talker. Father's a good talker, and Mother and me got into the way of listening. You do if you live with a good talker.”

Tembarom looked at the girl with a male gentleness, endeavoring to subdue open expression of the fact that he was convinced that she was as thoroughly aware of her father's salient characteristics as she was of other things.

“You do,” said Tembarom. Then picking up her scissors, which had dropped from her lap, and politely returning them, he added anxiously: “To think of you remembering Biker! I wonder, if I ever did get his job, if I could hold it down?”

“Yes,” decided Little Ann; “you could. I've noticed you're that kind of person, Mr. Tembarom.”

“Have you?” he said elatedly. “Say, honest Injun?”

“Yes.”

“I shall be getting stuck on myself if you encourage me like that,” he said, and then, his face falling, he added, “Biker graduated at Princeton.”

“I don't know much about society,” Little Ann remarked,—“I never saw any either up-town or down-town or in the country,—but I shouldn't think you'd have to have a college education to write the things you see about it in the newspaper paragraphs.”

Tembarom grinned.

“They're not real high-brow stuff, are they,” he said. “'There was a brilliant gathering on Tuesday evening at the house of Mr. Jacob Sturtburger at 79 Two Hundredth Street on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Miss Rachel Sturtburger to Mr. Eichenstein. The bride was attired in white peau de cygne trimmed with duchess lace.'”

Little Ann took him up. “I don't know what peau de cygne is, and I daresay the bride doesn't. I've never been to anything but a village school, but I could make up paragraphs like that myself.”

“That's the up-town kind,” said Tembarom. “The down-town ones wear their mothers' point-lace wedding-veils some-times, but they're not much different. Say, I believe I could do it if I had luck.”

“So do I,” returned Little Ann.

Tembarom looked down at the carpet, thinking the thing over. Ann went on sewing.

“That's the way with you,” he said presently: “you put things into a fellow's head. You've given me a regular boost, Little Ann.”

It is not unlikely that but for the sensible conviction in her voice he would have felt less bold when, two weeks later, Biker, having gone upon a “bust” too prolonged, was dismissed with-out benefit of clergy, and Galton desperately turned to Tembarom with anxious question in his eye.

“Do you think you could take this job?” he said.

Tembarom's heart, as he believed at the time, jumped into his throat.

“What do you think, Mr. Galton?” he asked.

“It isn't a thing to think about,” was Galton's answer. “It's a thing I must be sure of.”

“Well,” said Tembarom, “if you give it to me, I'll put up a mighty hard fight before I fall down.”

Galton considered him, scrutinizing keenly his tough, long-built body, his sharp, eager, boyish face, and especially his companionable grin.

“We'll let it go at that,” he decided. “You'll make friends up in Harlem, and you won't find it hard to pick up news. We can at least try it.”

Tembarom's heart jumped into his throat again, and he swallowed it once more. He was glad he was not holding his hat in his hand because he knew he would have forgotten himself and thrown it up into the air.

“Thank you, Mr. Galton,” he said, flushing tremendously. “I'd like to tell you how I appreciate your trusting me, but I don't know how. Thank you, sir.”

When he appeared in Mrs. Bowse's dining-room that evening there was a glow of elation about him and a swing in his entry which attracted all eyes at once. For some unknown reason everybody looked at him, and, meeting his eyes, detected the presence of some new exultation.

“Landed anything, T. T.?” Jim Bowles cried out. “You look it.”

“Sure I look it,” Tembarom answered, taking his napkin out of its ring with an unconscious flourish. “I've landed the up-town society page—landed it, by gee!”

A good-humored chorus of ejaculatory congratulation broke forth all round the table.

“Good business!” “Three cheers for T. T.!” “Glad of it!” “Here's luck!” said one after another.

They were all pleased, and it was generally felt that Galton had shown sense and done the right thing again. Even Mr. Hutchinson rolled about in his chair and grunted his approval.

After dinner Tembarom, Jim Bowles, and Julius Steinberger went upstairs stairs together and filled the hall bedroom with clouds of tobacco-smoke, tilting their chairs against the wall, smoking their pipes furiously, flushed and talkative, working themselves up with the exhilarated plannings of youth. Jim Bowles and Julius had been down on their luck for several weeks, and that “good old T. T.” should come in with this fairy-story was an actual stimulus. If you have never in your life been able to earn more than will pay for your food and lodging, twenty dollars looms up large. It might be the beginning of anything.

“First thing is to get on to the way to do it,” argued Tembarom. “I don't know the first thing. I've got to think it out. I couldn't ask Biker. He wouldn't tell me, anyhow.”

“He's pretty mad, I guess,” said Steinberger.

“Mad as hops,” Tembarom answered. “As I was coming down-stairs from Galton's room he was standing in the hall talking to Miss Dooley, and he said: `That Tembarom fellow's going to do it! He doesn't know how to spell. I should like to see his stuff come in.' He said it loud, because he wanted me to hear it, and he sort of laughed through his nose.”

“Say, T. T., can you spell?” Jim inquired thoughtfully.

“Spell? Me? No,” Tembarom owned with unshaken good cheer. “What I've got to do is to get a tame dictionary and keep it chained to the leg of my table. Those words with two m's or two l's in them get me right down on the mat. But the thing that looks biggest to me is how to find out where the news is, and the name of the fellow that'll put me on to it. You can't go up a man's front steps and ring the bell and ask him if he's going to be married or buried or have a pink tea.”

“Wasn't that a knock at the door?” said Steinberger.

It was a knock, and Tembarom jumped up and threw the door open, thinking Mrs. Bowse might have come on some household errand. But it was Little Ann Hutchinson instead of Mrs. Bowse, and there was a threaded needle stuck into the front of her dress, and she had on a thimble.

“I want Mr. Bowles's new socks,” she said maternally. “I promised I'd mark them for him.”

Bowles and Steinberger sprang from their chairs, and came forward in the usual comfortable glow of pleasure at sight of her.

“What do you think of that for all the comforts of a home?” said Tembarom. “As if it wasn't enough for a man to have new socks without having marks put on them! What are your old socks made of anyhow—solid gold? Burglars ain't going to break in and steal them.”

“They won't when I've marked them, Mr. Tembarom,” answered Little Ann, looking up at him with sober, round, for-get-me-not blue eyes, but with a deep dimple breaking out near her lip; “but all three pairs would not come home from the wash if I didn't.”

“Three pairs!” ejaculated Tembarom. “He's got three pairs of socks! New? That's what's been the matter with him for the last week. Don't you mark them for him, Little Ann. 'Tain't good for a man to have everything.”

“Here they are,” said Jim, bringing them forward. “Twenty-five marked down to ten at Tracy's. Are they pretty good?”

Little Ann looked them over with the practised eye of a connoisseur of bargains.

“They'd be about a shilling in Manchester shops,” she decided, “and they might be put down to sixpence. They're good enough to take care of.”

She was not the young woman who is ready for prolonged lively conversation in halls and at bedroom doors, and she had turned away with the new socks in her hand when Tembarom, suddenly inspired, darted after her.

“Say, I've just thought of something,” he exclaimed eagerly. “It's something I want to ask you.”

“What is it?”

“It's about the society-page lay-out.” He hesitated. “I wonder if it'd be rushing you too much if—say,” he suddenly broke off, and standing with his hands in his pockets, looked down at her with anxious admiration, “I believe you just know about everything.”

“No, I don't, Mr. Tembarom; but I'm very glad about the page. Everybody's glad.”

One of the chief difficulties Tembarom found facing him when he talked to Little Ann was the difficulty of resisting an awful temptation to take hold of her—to clutch her to his healthy, tumultuous young breast and hold her there firmly. He was half ashamed of himself when he realized it, but he knew that his venial weakness was shared by Jim Bowles and Steinberger and probably others. She was so slim and light and soft, and the serious frankness of her eyes and the quaint air of being a sort of grown-up child of astonishing intelligence produced an effect it was necessary to combat with.

“What I wanted to say,” he put it to her, “was that I believe if you'd just let me talk this thing out to you it'd do me good. I believe you'd help me to get somewhere. I've got to fix up a scheme for getting next the people who have things happening to them that I can make society stuff out of, you know. Biker didn't make a hit of it, but, gee! I've just got to. I've got to.”

“Yes,” answered Little Ann, her eyes fixed on him thoughtfully; “you've got to, Mr. Tembarom.”

“There's not a soul in the parlor. Would you mind coming down and sitting there while I talk at you and try to work things out? You could go on with your marking.”

She thought it over a minute.

“I'll do it if Father can spare me,” she made up her mind. “I'll go and ask him.”

She went to ask him, and returned in two or three minutes with her small sewing-basket in her hand.

“He can spare me,” she said. “He's reading his paper, and doesn't want to talk.”

They went down-stairs together and found the room empty. Tembarom turned up the lowered gas, and Little Ann sat down in the cozy-corner with her work-basket on her knee. Tembarom drew up a chair and sat down opposite to her. She threaded a needle and took up one of Jim's new socks.

“Now,” she said.

“It's like this,” he explained. “The page is a new deal, anyhow. There didn't used to be an up-town society column at all. It was all Fifth Avenue and the four hundred; but ours isn't a fashionable paper, and their four hundred ain't going to buy it to read their names in it. They'd rather pay to keep out of it. Uptown's growing like smoke, and there's lots of people up that way that'd like their friends to read about their weddings and receptions, and would buy a dozen copies to send away when their names were in. There's no end of women and girls that'd like to see their clothes described and let their friends read the descriptions. They'd buy the paper, too, you bet. It'll be a big circulation-increaser. It's Galton's idea, and he gave the job to Biker because he thought an educated fellow could get hold of people. But somehow he couldn't. Seems as if they didn't like him. He kept getting turned down. The page has been mighty poor—no pictures of brides or anything. Galton's been sick over it. He'd been sure it'd make a hit. Then Biker's always drinking more or less, and he's got the swell head, anyhow. I believe that's the reason he couldn't make good with the up-towners.”

“Perhaps he was too well educated, Mr. Tembarom,” said Little Ann. She was marking a letter J in red cotton, and her outward attention was apparently wholly fixed on her work.

“Say, now,” Tembarom broke out, “there's where you come in. You go on working as if there was nothing but that sock in New York, but I guess you've just hit the dot. Perhaps that was it. He wanted to do Fifth Avenue work anyway, and he didn't go at Harlem right. He put on Princeton airs when he asked questions. Gee! a fellow can't put on any kind of airs when he's the one that's got to ask.”

“You'll get on better,” remarked Little Ann. “You've got a friendly way and you've a lot of sense. I've noticed it.”

Her head was bent over the red J and she still looked at it and not at Tembarom. This was not coyness, but simple, calm absorption. If she had not been making the J, she would have sat with her hands folded in her lap, and gazed at the young man with undisturbed attention.

“Have you?” said Tembarom, gratefully. “That gives me another boost, Little Ann. What a man seems to need most is just plain twenty-cents-a-yard sense. Not that I ever thought I had the dollar kind. I'm not putting on airs.”

“Mr. Galton knows the kind you have. I suppose that's why he gave you the page.” The words, spoken in the shrewd-sounding Manchester accent, were neither flattering nor unflattering; they were merely impartial.

“Well, now I've got it, I can't fall down,” said Tembarom. “I've got to find out for myself how to get next to the people I want to talk to. I've got to find out who to get next to.”

Little Ann put in the final red stitch of the letter J and laid the sock neatly folded on the basket.

“I've just been thinking something, Mr. Tembarom,” she said. “Who makes the wedding-cakes?”

He gave a delighted start.

“Gee!” he broke out, “the wedding-cakes!”

“Yes,” Little Ann proceeded, “they'd have to have wedding-cakes, and perhaps if you went to the shops where they're sold and could make friends with the people, they'd tell you whom they were selling them to, and you could get the addresses and go and find out things.”

Tembarom, glowing with admiring enthusiasm, thrust out his hand.

“Little Ann, shake!” he said. “You've given me the whole show, just like I thought you would. You're just the limit.”

“Well, a wedding-cake's the next thing after the bride,” she answered.

Her practical little head had given him the practical lead. The mere wedding-cake opened up vistas. Confectioners supplied not only weddings, but refreshments for receptions and dances. Dances suggested the “halls” in which they were held. You could get information at such places. Then there were the churches, and the florists who decorated festal scenes. Tembarom's excitement grew as he talked. One plan led to another; vistas opened on all sides. It all began to look so easy that he could not understand how Biker could possibly have gone into such a land of promise, and returned embittered and empty-handed.

“He thought too much of himself and too little of other people,” Little Ann summed him up in her unsevere, reasonable voice. “That's so silly.”

Tembarom tried not to look at her affectionately, but his voice was affectionate as well as admiring, despite him.

“The way you get on to a thing just in three words!” he said. “Daniel Webster ain't in it.”

“I dare say if you let the people in the shops know that you come from a newspaper, it'll be a help,” she went on with ingenuous worldly wisdom. “They'll think it'll be a kind of advertisement. And so it will. You get some neat cards printed with your name and Sunday Earth on them.”

“Gee!” Tembarom ejaculated, slapping his knee, “there's another! You think of every darned thing, don't you?”

She stopped a moment to look at him.

“You'd have thought of it all yourself after a bit,” she said. She was not of those unseemly women whose intention it is manifestly to instruct the superior man. She had been born in a small Manchester street and trained by her mother, whose own training had evolved through affectionately discreet conjugal management of Mr. Hutchinson.

“Never you let a man feel set down when you want him to see a thing reasonable, Ann,” she had said. “You never get on with them if you do. They can't stand it. The Almighty seemed to make 'em that way. They've always been masters, and it don't hurt any woman to let 'em be, if she can help 'em to think reasonable. Just you make a man feel comfortable in his mind and push him the reasonable way. But never you shove him, Ann. If you do, he'll just get all upset-like. Me and your father have been right-down happy together, but we never should have been if I hadn't thought that out before we was married two weeks. Perhaps it's the Almighty's will, though I never was as sure of the Almighty's way of thinking as some are.”

Of course Tembarom felt soothed and encouraged, though he belonged to the male development which is not automatically infuriated at a suspicion of female readiness of logic.

“Well, I might have got on to it in time,” he answered, still trying not to look affectionate, “but I've no time to spare. Gee! but I'm glad you're here!”

“I sha'n't be here very long.” There was a shade of patient regret in her voice. “Father's got tired of trying America. He's been disappointed too often. He's going back to England.”

“Back to England!” Tembarom cried out forlornly, “Oh Lord! What shall we all do without you, Ann?”

“You'll do as you did before we came,” said Little Ann.

“No, we sha'n't. We can't. I can't anyhow.” He actually got up from his chair and began to walk about, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

Little Ann began to put her first stitches into a red B. No human being could have told what she thought.

“We mustn't waste time talking about that,” she said. “Let us talk about the page. There are dressmakers, you know. If you could make friends with a dressmaker or two they'd tell you what the wedding things were really made of. Women do like their clothes to be described right.”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER III

His work upon the page began the following week. When the first morning of his campaign opened with a tumultuous blizzard, Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger privately sympathized with him as they dressed in company, but they heard him whistling in his own hall bedroom as he put on his clothes, and to none of the three did it occur that time could be lost because the weather was inhuman. Blinding snow was being whirled through the air by a wind which had bellowed across the bay, and torn its way howling through the streets, maltreating people as it went, snatching their breath out of them, and leaving them gaspingly clutching at hats and bending their bodies before it. Street-cars went by loaded from front to back platform, and were forced from want of room to whizz heartlessly by groups waiting anxiously at street corners.

Tembarom saw two or three of them pass in this way, leaving the waiting ones desperately huddled together behind them. He braced himself and whistled louder as he buttoned his celluloid collar.

“I'm going to get up to Harlem all the same,” he said. “The 'L' will be just as jammed, but there'll be a place somewhere, and I'll get it.”

His clothes were the outwardly decent ones of a young man who must perforce seek cheap clothing-stores, and to whom a ten-dollar “hand-me-down” is a source of exultant rejoicing. With the aid of great care and a straight, well-formed young body, he managed to make the best of them; but they were not to be counted upon for warmth even in ordinarily cold weather. His overcoat was a specious covering, and was not infrequently odorous of naphtha.

“You've got to know something about first aid to the wounded if you live on ten per,” he had said once to Little Ann. “A suit of clothes gets to be an emergency-case mighty often if it lasts three years.”

“Going up to Harlem to-day, T. T.?” his neighbor at table asked him as he sat down to breakfast.

“Right there,” he answered. “I've ordered the limousine round, with the foot-warmer and fur rugs.”

“I guess a day wouldn't really matter much,” said Mrs. Bowse, good-naturedly. “Perhaps it might be better to-morrow.”

“And perhaps it mightn't,” said Tembarom, eating “break-fast-food” with a cheerful appetite. “What you can't be stone-cold sure of to-morrow you drive a nail in to-day.”

He ate a tremendous breakfast as a discreet precautionary measure. The dark dining-room was warm, and the food was substantial. It was comfortable in its way.

“You'd better hold the hall door pretty tight when you go out, and don't open it far,” said Mrs. Bowse as he got up to go. “There's wind enough to upset things.”

Tembarom went out in the hall, and put on his insufficient overcoat. He buttoned it across his chest, and turned its collar up to his ears. Then he bent down to turn up the bottoms of his trousers.

“A pair of arctics would be all to the merry right here,” he said, and then he stood upright and saw Little Ann coming down the staircase holding in her hand a particularly ugly tar-tan-plaid woolen neck-scarf of the kind known in England as a “comforter.”

“If you are going out in this kind of weather,” she said in her serene, decided little voice, “you'd better wrap this comforter right round your neck, Mr. Tembarom. It's one of Father's, and he can spare it because he's got another, and, besides, he's not going out.”

Tembarom took it with a sudden emotional perception of the fact that he was being taken care of in an abnormally luxurious manner.

“Now, I appreciate that,” he said. “The thing about you. Little Ann, is that you never make a wrong guess about what a fellow needs, do you?”

“I'm too used to taking care of Father not to see things,” she answered.

“What you get on to is how to take care of the whole world—initials on a fellow's socks and mufflers round his neck.” His eyes looked remarkably bright.

“If a person were taking care of the whole world, he'd have a lot to do,” was her sedate reception of the remark. “You'd better put that twice round your neck, Mr. Tembarom.”

She put up her hand to draw the end of the scarf over his shoulder, and Tembarom stood still at once, as though he were a little boy being dressed for school. He looked down at her round cheek, and watched one of the unexpected dimples reveal itself in a place where dimples are not usually anticipated. It was coming out because she was smiling a small, observing smile. It was an almost exciting thing to look at, and he stood very still indeed. A fellow who did not own two pairs of boots would be a fool not to keep quiet.

“You haven't told me I oughtn't to go out till the blizzard lets up,” he said presently.

“No, I haven't, Mr. Tembarom,” she answered. “You're one of the kind that mean to do a thing when they've made up their minds. It'll be a nice bit of money if you can keep the page.”

“Galton said he'd give me a chance to try to make good,” said Tembarom. “And if it's the hit he thinks it ought to be, he'll raise me ten. Thirty per. Vanastorbilts won't be in it. I think I'll get married,” he added, showing all his attractive teeth at once.

“I wouldn't do that,” she said. “It wouldn't be enough to depend on. New York's an expensive place.”

She drew back and looked him over. “That'll keep you much warmer,” she decided. “Now you can go. I've been looking in the telephone-book for confectioners, and I've written down these addresses.” She handed him a slip of paper.

Tembarom caught his breath.

“Hully gee!” he exclaimed, “there never were TWO of you made! One used up all there was of it. How am I going to thank you, anyhow!”

“I do hope you'll be able to keep the page,” she said. “I do that, Mr. Tembarom.”

If there had been a touch of coquetry in her earnest, sober, round, little face she would have been less distractingly alluring, but there was no shade of anything but a sort of softly motherly anxiety in the dropped note of her voice, and it was almost more than flesh and blood at twenty-five could stand. Tembarom made a hasty, involuntary move toward her, but it was only a slight one, and it was scarcely perceptible before he had himself in hand and hurriedly twisted his muffler tighter, showing his teeth again cheerily.

“You keep on hoping it all day without a let-up,” he said. “And tell Mr. Hutchinson I'm obliged to him, please. Get out of the way, Little Ann, while I go out. The wind might blow you and the hat-stand upstairs.”

He opened the door and dashed down the high steps into the full blast of the blizzard. He waited at the street corner while three overcrowded cars whizzed past him, ignoring his signals because there was not an inch of space left in them for another passenger. Then he fought his way across two or three blocks to the nearest “L” station. He managed to wedge himself into a train there, and then at least he was on his way. He was thinking hard and fast, but through all his planning the warm hug of the tartan comforter round his neck kept Little Ann near him. He had been very thankful for the additional warmth as the whirling snow and wind had wrought their will with him while he waited for the cars at the street corner. On the “L” train he saw her serious eyes and heard the motherly drop in her voice as she said, “I do hope you'll be able to keep the page. I do that, Mr. Tembarom.” It made him shut his hands hard as they hung in his overcoat pockets for warmth, and it made him shut his sound teeth strongly.

“Gee! I've got to!” his thoughts said for him. “If I make it, perhaps my luck will have started. When a man's luck gets started, every darned thing's to the good.”

The “L” had dropped most of its crowd when it reached the up-town station among the hundredth streets which was his destination. He tightened his comforter, tucked the ends firmly into the front of his overcoat, and started out along the platform past the office, and down the steep, iron steps, already perilous with freezing snow. He had to stop to get his breath when he reached the street, but he did not stop long. He charged forth again along the pavement, looking closely at the shop-windows. There were naturally but few passers-by, and the shops were not important-looking; but they were open, and he could see that the insides of them looked comfortable in contrast with the blizzard-ruled street. He could not see both sides of the street as he walked up one side of the block without coming upon a confectioner's. He crossed at the corner and turned back on the other side. Presently he saw that a light van was standing before one place, backed up against the sidewalk to receive parcels, its shuddering horse holding its head down and bracing itself with its forelegs against the wind. At any rate, something was going on there, and he hurried forward to find out what it was. The air was so thick with myriads of madly flying bits of snow, which seemed whirled in all directions in the air, that he could not see anything definite even a few yards away. When he reached the van he found that he had also reached his confectioner. The sign over the window read “M. Munsberg, Confectionery. Cakes. Ice-Cream. Weddings, Balls and Receptions.”

“Made a start, anyhow,” said Tembarom.

He turned into the store, opening the door carefully, and thereby barely escaping being blown violently against a stout, excited, middle-aged little Jew who was bending over a box he was packing. This was evidently Mr. Munsberg, who was extremely busy, and even the modified shock upset his temper.

“Vhere you goin'?” he cried out. “Can't you look vhere you're goin'?”

Tembarom knew this was not a good beginning, but his natural mental habit of vividly seeing the other man's point of view helped him after its usual custom. His nice grin showed itself.

“I wasn't going; I was coming,” he said. “Beg pardon. The wind's blowing a hundred miles an hour.”

A good-looking young woman, who was probably Mrs. Munsberg, was packing a smaller box behind the counter. Tembarom lifted his hat, and she liked it.

“He didn't do it a bit fresh,” she said later. “Kind o' nice.” She spoke to him with professional politeness.

“Is there anything you want?” she asked.

Tembarom glanced at the boxes and packages standing about and at Munsberg, who had bent over his packing again. Here was an occasion for practical tact.

“I've blown in at the wrong time,” he said. “You're busy getting things out on time. I'll just wait.. Gee! I'm glad to be inside. I want to speak to Mr. Munsberg.”

Mr. Munsberg jerked himself upright irascibly, and broke forth in the accent of the New York German Jew.

“If you comin' in here to try to sell somedings, young man, joost you let that same vind vat blew you in blow you right out pretty quick. I'm not buyin' nodings. I'm busy.”

“I'm not selling a darned thing,” answered Tembarom, with undismayed cheer.

“You vant someding?” jerked out Munsberg.

“Yes, I want something,” Tembarom answered, “but it's nothing any one has to pay for. I'm only a newspaper man.” He felt a glow of pride as he said the words. He was a newspaper man even now. “Don't let me stop you a minute. I'm in luck to get inside anywhere and sit down. Let me wait.”

Mrs. Munsberg read the Sunday papers and revered them. She also knew the value of advertisement. She caught her husband's eye and hurriedly winked at him.

“It's awful outside. 'T won't do harm if he waits—if he ain't no agent,” she put in.

“See,” said Tembarom, handing over one of the cards which had been Little Ann's businesslike inspiration.

“T. Tembarom. New York Sunday Earth,” read Munsberg, rather grudgingly. He looked at T. Tembarom, and T. Tembarom looked back at him. The normal human friendliness in the sharp boyish face did it.

“Vell,” he said, making another jerk toward a chair, “if you ain't no agent, you can vait.”

“Thank you,” said Tembarom, and sat down. He had made another start, anyhow.

After this the packing went on fast and furious. A youth appeared from the back of the store, and ran here and there as he was ordered. Munsberg and his wife filled wooden and cardboard boxes with small cakes and larger ones, with sandwiches and salads, candies and crystallized fruits. Into the larger box was placed a huge cake with an icing temple on the top of it, with silver doves adorning it outside and in. There was no mistaking the poetic significance of that cake. Outside the blizzard whirled clouds of snow-particles through the air, and the van horse kept his head down and his forelegs braced. His driver had long since tried to cover him with a blanket which the wind continually tore loose from its fastenings, and flapped about the creature's sides. Inside the store grew hot. There was hurried moving about, banging of doors, excited voices, irascible orders given and countermanded. Tembarom found out in five minutes that the refreshments were for a wedding reception to be held at a place known as “The Hall,” and the goods must be sent out in time to be ready for the preparations for the wedding supper that night.

“If I knew how to handle it, I could get stuff for a column just sitting here,” he thought. He kept both eyes and ears open. He was sharp enough to realize that the mere sense of familiarity with detail which he was gaining was material in itself. Once or twice he got up and lent a hand with a box in his casual way, and once or twice he saw that he could lift some-thing down or up for Mrs. Munsberg, who was a little woman. The natural casualness of his way of jumping up to do the things prevented any suspicion of officiousness, and also prevented his waiting figure from beginning to wear the air of a superfluous object in the way. He waited a long time, and circumstances so favored him as to give him a chance or so. More than once exactly the right moment presented itself when he could interject an apposite remark. Twice he made Munsberg laugh, and twice Mrs. Munsberg voluntarily addressed him.

At last the boxes and parcels ware all carried out and stored in the van, after strugglings with the opening and shutting of doors, and battlings with outside weather.

When this was all over, Munsberg came back into the store, knocking his hands together and out of breath.

“Dot's all right,” he said. “It'll all be there plenty time. Vouldn't have fell down on that order for tventy-vive dollars. Dot temple on the cake was splendid. Joseph he done it fine.”

“He never done nothin' no finer,” Mrs. Munsberg said. “It looked as good as anything on Fift' Avenoo.”

Both were relieved and pleased with themselves, their store, and their cake-decorator. Munsberg spoke to Tembarom in the manner of a man who, having done a good thing, does not mind talking about it.

“Dot was a big order,” he remarked.

“I should smile,” answered Tembarom. “I'd like to know whose going to get outside all that good stuff. That wedding-cake took the tart away from anything I've ever seen. Which of the four hundred's going to eat it?”

“De man vot ordered dot cake,” Munsberg swaggered, “he's not got to vorry along on vun million nor two. He owns de biggest brewery in New York, I guess in America. He's Schwartz of Schwartz & Kapfer.”

“Well, he 's got it to burn!” said Tembarom.

“He's a mighty good man,” went on Munsberg. “He's mighty fond of his own people. He made his first money in Harlem, and he had a big fight to get it; but his own people vas good to him, an' he's never forgot it. He's built a fine house here, an' his girls is fine girls. De vun's goin' to be married to-night her name's Rachel, an' she's goin' to marry a nice feller, Louis Levy. Levy built the big entertainment-hall vhere the reception's goin' to be. It's decorated vith two thousand dollars' worth of bride roses an' lilies of de valley an' smilax. All de up-town places vas bought out, an' den Schwartz vent down Fift' Avenoo.”

The right moment had plainly arrived.

“Say, Mr. Munsberg,” Tembarom broke forth, “you're giving me just what I wanted to ask you for. I'm the new up-town society reporter for the Sunday Earth, and I came in here to see if you wouldn't help me to get a show at finding out who was going to have weddings and society doings. I didn't know just how to start.”

Munsberg gave a sort of grunt. He looked less amiable.

“I s'pose you're used to nothin' but Fift' Avenoo,” he said.

Tembarom grinned exactly at the right time again. Not only his good teeth grinned, but his eyes grinned also, if the figure may be used.

“Fifth Avenue!” he laughed. “There's been no Fifth Avenue in mine. I'm not used to anything, but you may bet your life I'm going to get used to Harlem, if you people'll let me. I've just got this job, and I'm dead stuck on it. I want to make it go.”

“He's mighty different from Biker,” said Mrs. Munsberg in an undertone.

“Vhere's dod oder feller?” inquired Munsberg. “He vas a dam fool, dot oder feller, half corned most de time, an' puttin' on Clarence airs. No one was goin' to give him nothin'. He made folks mad at de start.”

“I've got his job,” said Tembarom, “and if I can't make it go, the page will be given up. It'll be my fault if that happens, not Harlem's. There's society enough up-town to make a first-class page, and I shall be sick if I can't get on to it.”

He had begun to know his people. Munsberg was a good-natured, swaggering little Hebrew.

That the young fellow should make a clean breast of it and claim no down-town superiority, and that he should also have the business insight to realize that he might obtain valuable society items from such a representative confectioner as M. Munsberg, was a situation to incite amiable sentiments.

“Vell, you didn't come to de wrong place,” he said. “All de biggest things comes to me, an' I don't mind tellin' you about 'em. 'T ain't goin' to do no harm. Weddings an' things dey ought to be wrote up, anyhow, if dey're done right. It's good for business. Vy don't dey have no pictures of de supper-tables? Dot'd be good.”

“There's lots of receptions and weddings this month,” said Mrs. Munsberg, becoming agreeably excited. “And there's plenty handsome young girls that'd like their pictures published.

“None of them have been in Sunday papers before, and they'd like it. The four Schwartz girls would make grand pictures. They dress splendid, and their bridesmaids dresses came from the biggest place in Fift' Avenoo.”

“Say,” exclaimed Tembarom, rising from his chair, “I'm in luck. Luck struck me the minute I turned in here. If you'll tell me where Schwartz lives, and where the hall is, and the church, and just anything else I can use, I'll go out and whoop up a page to beat the band.” He was glowing with exultation. “I know I can do it. You've started me off.”

Munsberg and his wife began to warm. It was almost as though they had charge of the society page themselves. There was something stimulating in the idea. There was a suggestion of social importance in it. They knew a number of people who would be pleased with the prospect of being in the Sunday Earth. They were of a race which holds together, and they gave not only the names and addresses of prospective entertainers, but those of florists and owners of halls where parties were given.

Mrs. Munsberg gave the name of a dressmaker of whom she shrewdly guessed that she would be amiably ready to talk to a society-page reporter.

“That Biker feller,” she said, “got things down all wrong. He called fine white satin 'white nun's-veiling,' and he left out things. Never said nothing about Miss Lewishon's diamond ring what her grandpa gave her for a wedding-present. An' it cost two hundred and fifty.”

“Well, I'm a pretty big fool myself,” said Tembarom, “but I should have known better than that.”

When he opened the door to go, Mrs. Munsberg called after him:

“When you get through, you come back here and tell us what you done. I'll give you a cup of hot coffee.”

He returned to Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house so late that night that even Steinberger and Bowles had ended their day. The gas in the hall was turned down to a glimmering point, and the house was silent for the night. Even a cat who stole to him and rubbed herself against his leg miauwed in a sort of abortive whisper, opening her mouth wide, but emitting no sound. When he went cautiously up the staircase he carried his damp overcoat with him, and hung it in company with the tartan muffler close to the heater in the upper hall. Then he laid on his bedside table a package of papers and photographs.

After he had undressed, he dropped heavily into bed, exhausted, but elate.

“I'm dog-tired,” he said, “but I guess I've got it going.” And almost before the last word had uttered itself he fell into the deep sleep of worn-out youth.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER IV

Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house began to be even better pleased with him than before. He had stories to tell, festivities to describe, and cheerful incidents to recount. The boarders assisted vicariously at weddings and wedding receptions, afternoon teas and dances, given in halls. “Up-town” seemed to them largely given to entertainment and hilarity of an enviably prodigal sort. Mrs. Bowse's guests were not of the class which entertains or is entertained, and the details of banquets and ball-dresses and money-spending were not uncheering material for conversation. Such topics suggested the presence and dispensing of a good deal of desirable specie, which in floating about might somehow reach those who needed it most. The impression was that T. Tembarom was having “a good time.” It was not his way to relate any incidents which were not of a cheering or laughter-inspiring nature. He said nothing of the times when his luck was bad, when he made blunders, and, approaching the wrong people, was met roughly or grudgingly, and found no resource left but to beat a retreat. He made no mention of his experiences in the blizzard, which continued, and at times nearly beat breath and life out of him as he fought his way through it. Especially he told no story of the morning when, after having labored furiously over the writing of his “stuff” until long after midnight, he had taken it to Galton, and seen his face fall as he looked over it. To battle all day with a blizzard and occasional brutal discouragements, and to sit up half the night tensely absorbed in concentrating one's whole mental equipment upon the doing of unaccustomed work has its effect. As he waited, Tembarom unconsciously shifted from one foot to another, and had actually to swallow a sort of lump in his throat.

“I guess it won't do,” he said rather uncertainly as Galton laid a sheet down.

Galton was worn out himself and harried by his nerves.

“No, it won't,” he said; and then as he saw Tembarom move to the other foot he added, “Not as it is.”

Tembarom braced himself and cleared his throat.

“If,” he ventured—“well, you've been mighty easy on me, Mr Galton—and this is a big chance for a fellow like me. If it's too big a chance—why—that's all. But if it's anything I could change and it wouldn't be too much trouble to tell me—”

“There's no time to rewrite it,” answered Galton. “It must be handed in to-morrow. It's too flowery. Too many adjectives. I've no time to give you—” He snatched up a blue pencil and began to slash at the paper with it. “Look here—and here—cut out that balderdash—cut this—and this—oh,—” throwing the pencil down,—“you'd have to cut it all out. There's no time.” He fell back in his chair with a hopeless movement, and rubbed his forehead nervously with the back of his hand. Ten people more or less were waiting to speak to him; he was worn out with the rush of work. He believed in the page, and did not want to give up his idea; but he didn't know a man to hand it to other than this untrained, eager ignoramus whom he had a queer personal liking for. He was no business of his, a mere stenographer in his office with whom he could be expected to have no relations, and yet a curious sort of friendliness verging on intimacy had developed between them.

“There'd be time if you thought it wouldn't do any harm to give me another chance,” said Tembarom. “I can sit up all night. I guess I've caught on to what you DON'T want. I've put in too many fool words. I got them out of other papers, but I don't know how to use them. I guess I've caught on. Would it do any harm if you gave me till to-morrow?”

“No, it wouldn't,” said Galton, desperately. “If you can't do it, there's no time to find another man, and the page must be cut out. It's been no good so far. It won't be missed. Take it along.”

As he pushed back the papers, he saw the photographs, and picked one up.

“That bride's a good-looking girl. Who are these others? Bridesmaids? You've got a lot of stuff here. Biker couldn't get anything.” He glanced up at the young fellow's rather pale face. “I thought you'd make friends. How did you get all this?”

“I beat the streets till I found it,” said Tembarom. “I had luck right away. I went into a confectionery store where they make wedding-cakes. A good-natured little Dutchman and his wife kept it, and I talked to them—”

“Got next?” said Galton, grinning a little.

“They gave me addresses, and told me a whole lot of things. I got into the Schwartz wedding reception, and they treated me mighty well. A good many of them were willing to talk. I told them what a big thing the page was going to be, and I—well, I said the more they helped me the finer it would turn out. I said it seemed a shame there shouldn't be an up-town page when such swell entertainments were given. I've got a lot of stuff there.”

Galton laughed.

“You'd get it,” he said. “If you knew how to handle it, you'd make it a hit. Well, take it along. If it isn't right tomorrow, it's done for.”

Tembarom didn't tell stories or laugh at dinner that evening. He said he had a headache. After dinner he bolted upstairs after Little Ann, and caught her before she mounted to her upper floor.

“Will you come and save my life again?” he said. “I'm in the tightest place I ever was in in my life.”

“I'll do anything I can, Mr. Tembarom,” she answered, and as his face had grown flushed by this time she looked anxious. “You look downright feverish.”

“I've got chills as well as fever,” he said. “It's the page. It seems like I was going to fall down on it.”

She turned back at once.

“No you won't, Mr. Tembarom,” she said “I'm just right-down sure you won't.”

They went down to the parlor again, and though there were people in it, they found a corner apart, and in less than ten minutes he had told her what had happened.

She took the manuscript he handed to her.

“If I was well educated, I should know how to help you,” she said, “but I've only been to a common Manchester school. I don't know anything about elegant language. What are these?” pointing to the blue-pencil marks.

Tembarom explained, and she studied the blue slashes with serious attention.

“Well,” she said in a few minutes, laying the manuscript down, “I should have cut those words out myself if—if you'd asked me which to take away. They're too showy, Mr. Tembarom.”

Tembarom whipped a pencil out of his pocket and held it out.

“Say,” he put it to her, “would you take this and draw it through a few of the other showy ones?”

“I should feel as if I was taking too much upon myself,” she said. “I don't know anything about it.”

“You know a darned sight more than I do,” Tembarom argued. “I didn't know they were showy. I thought they were the kind you had to put in newspaper stuff.”

She held the sheets of paper on her knee, and bent her head over them. Tembarom watched her dimples flash in and out as she worked away like a child correcting an exercise. Presently he saw she was quite absorbed. Sometimes she stopped and thought, pressing her lips together; sometimes she changed a letter. There was no lightness in her manner. A badly mutilated stocking would have claimed her attention in the same way.

“I think I'd put 'house' there instead of 'mansion' if I were you,” she suggested once.

“Put in a whole block of houses if you like,” he answered gratefully. “Whatever you say goes. I believe Galton would say the same thing.”

She went over sheet after sheet, and though she knew nothing about it, she cut out just what Galton would have cut out. She put the papers together at last and gave them back to Tembarom, getting up from her seat.

“I must go back to father now,” she said. “I promised to make him a good cup of coffee over the little oil-stove. If you'll come and knock at the door I'll give you one. It will help you to keep fresh while you work.”

Tembarom did not go to bed at all that night, and he looked rather fagged the next morning when he handed back the “stuff” entirely rewritten. He swallowed several times quite hard as he waited for the final verdict.

“You did catch on to what I didn't want,” Galton said at last. “You will catch on still more as you get used to the work. And you did get the 'stuff'.”

“That—you mean—that goes?” Tembarom stammered.

“Yes, it goes,” answered Galton. “You can turn it in. We'll try the page for a month.”

“Gee! Thank the Lord!” said Tembarom, and then he laughed an excited boyish laugh, and the blood came back to his face. He had a whole month before him, and if he had caught on as soon as this, a month would teach him a lot.

He'd work like a dog.

He worked like a healthy young man impelled by a huge enthusiasm, and seeing ahead of him something he had had no practical reason for aspiring to. He went out in all weathers and stayed out to all hours. Whatsoever rebuffs or difficulties he met with he never was even on the verge of losing his nerve. He actually enjoyed himself tremendously at times. He made friends; people began to like to see him. The Munsbergs regarded him as an inspiration of their own.

“He seen my name over de store and come in here first time he vas sent up dis vay to look for t'ings to write,” Mr. Munsberg always explained. “Ve vas awful busy—time of the Schwartz vedding, an' dere vas dat blizzard. He owned up he vas new, an' vanted some vun vhat knew to tell him vhat vas goin' on. 'Course I could do it. Me an' my vife give him addresses an' a lot of items. He vorked 'em up good. Dot up-town page is gettin' first-rate. He says he don' know vhat he'd have done if he hadn't turned up here dot day.”

Tembarom, having “caught on” to his fault of style, applied himself with vigor to elimination. He kept his tame dictionary chained to the leg of his table—an old kitchen table which Mrs. Bowse scrubbed and put into his hall bedroom, overcrowding it greatly. He turned to Little Ann at moments of desperate uncertainty, but he was man enough to do his work himself. In glorious moments when he was rather sure that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober alluringness,—it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his blood,—he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD “get away with it” to the extent of making enough to—but he always pulled himself up in time.

“Nice fool I look, thinking that way!” he would say to himself. “She'd throw me down hard if she knew. But, my Lord! ain't she just a peach!”

It was in the last week of the month of trial which was to decide the permanency of the page that he came upon the man Mrs. Bowse's boarders called his “Freak.” He never called him a “freak” himself even at the first. Even his somewhat undeveloped mind felt itself confronted at the outset with something too abnormal and serious, something with a suggestion of the weird and tragic in it.

In this wise it came about:

The week had begun with another blizzard, which after the second day had suddenly changed its mind, and turned into sleet and rain which filled the streets with melted snow, and made walking a fearsome thing. Tembarom had plenty of walking to do. This week's page was his great effort, and was to be a “dandy.” Galton must be shown what pertinacity could do.

“I'm going to get into it up to my neck, and then strike out,” he said at breakfast on Monday morning.

Thursday was his most strenuous day. The weather had decided to change again, and gusts of sleet were being driven about, which added cold to sloppiness. He had found it difficult to get hold of some details he specially wanted. Two important and extremely good-looking brides had refused to see him because Biker had enraged them in his day. He had slighted the description of their dresses at a dance where they had been the observed of all observers, and had worn things brought from Paris. Tembarom had gone from house to house. He had even searched out aunts whose favor he had won professionally. He had appealed to his dressmaker, whose affection he had by that time fully gained. She was doing work in the brides' houses, and could make it clear that he would not call peau de cygne “Surah silk,” nor duchess lace “Baby Irish.” But the young ladies enjoyed being besought by a society page. It was something to discuss with one's bridesmaids and friends, to protest that “those interviewers” give a person no peace. “If you don't want to be in the papers, they'll put you in whether you like it or not, however often you refuse them.” They kept Tembarom running about, they raised faint hopes, and then went out when he called, leaving no messages, but allowing the servant to hint that if he went up to Two Hundred and Seventy-fifth Street he might chance to find them.

“All right,” said Tembarom to the girl, delighting her by lifting his hat genially as he turned to go down the steps. “I'll just keep going. The Sunday Earth can't come out without those photographs in it. I should lose my job.”

When at last he ran the brides to cover it was not at Two Hundred and Seventy-fifth Street, but in their own home, to which they had finally returned. They had heard from the servant-girl about what the young gentleman from the Sunday Earth had said, and they were mollified by his proper appreciation of values. Tembarom's dressmaker friend also proffered information.

“I know him myself,” she said, “and he's a real nice gentle-manlike young man. He's not a bit like Biker. He doesn't think he knows everything. He came to me from Mrs. Munsberg, just to ask me the names of fashionable materials. He said it was more important than a man knew till he found out” Miss Stuntz chuckled.

“He asked me to lend him some bits of samples so he could learn them off by heart, and know them when he saw them. He's got a pleasant laugh; shows his teeth, and they're real pretty and white; and he just laughed like a boy and said: 'These samples are my alphabet, Miss Stuntz. I'm going to learn to read words of three syllables in them.'”

When late in the evening Tembarom, being let out of the house after his interview, turned down the steps again, he carried with him all he had wanted—information and photographs, even added picturesque details. He was prepared to hand in a fuller and better page than he had ever handed in before. He was in as elated a frame of mind as a young man can be when he is used up with tramping the streets, and running after street-cars, to stand up in them and hang by a strap. He had been wearing a new pair of boots, one of which rubbed his heel and had ended by raising a blister worthy of attention. To reach the nearest “L” station he must walk across town, through several deserted streets in the first stages of being built up, their vacant lots surrounded by high board fencing covered with huge advertising posters. The hall bedroom, with the gas turned up and the cheap, red-cotton comfort on the bed, made an alluring picture as he faced the sleety wind.

“If I cut across to the avenue and catch the 'L,' I'm bound to get there sometime, anyhow,” he said as he braced himself and set out on his way.

The blister on his heel had given him a good deal of trouble, and he was obliged to stop a moment to ease it, and he limped when he began to walk again. But he limped as fast as he could, while the sleety rain beat in his face, across one street, down another for a block or so, across another, the melting snow soaking even the new boots as he splashed through it. He bent his head, however, and limped steadily. At this end of the city many of the streets were only scantily built up, and he was passing through one at the corner of which was a big vacant lot. At the other corner a row of cheap houses which had only reached their second story waited among piles of bricks and frozen mortar for the return of the workmen the blizzard had dispersed. It was a desolate-enough thoroughfare, and not a soul was in sight. The vacant lot was fenced in with high boarding plastered over with flaring sheets advertising whiskies, sauces, and theatrical ventures. A huge picture of a dramatically interrupted wedding ceremony done in reds and yellows, and announcing in large letters that Mr. Isaac Simonson presented Miss Evangeline St. Clair in “Rent Asunder,” occupied several yards of the boarding. As he reached it, the heel of Tembarom's boot pressed, as it seemed to him, a red-hot coal on the flesh. He had rubbed off the blister. He was obliged to stop a moment again.

“Gee whizz!” he exclaimed through his teeth, “I shall have to take my boot off and try to fix it.”

To accomplish this he leaned against the boarding and Miss Evangeline St. Clair being “Rent Asunder” in the midst of the wedding service. He cautiously removed his boot, and finding a hole in his sock in the place where the blister had rubbed off, he managed to protect the raw spot by pulling the sock over it. Then he drew on his boot again.

“That'll be better,” he said, with a long breath.

As he stood on his feet again he started involuntarily. This was not because the blister had hurt him, but because he had heard behind him a startling sound.

“What's that?” broke from him. “What's that?”

He turned and listened, feeling his heart give a quick thump. In the darkness of the utterly empty street the thing was unnatural enough to make any man jump. He had heard it between two gusts of wind, and through another he heard it again—an uncanny, awful sobbing, broken by a hopeless wail of words.

“I can't remember! I can't—remember! O my God!”

And it was not a woman's voice or a child's; it was a man's, and there was an eerie sort of misery in it which made Tembarom feel rather sick. He had never heard a man sobbing before. He belonged to a class which had no time for sobs. This sounded ghastly.

“Good Lord!” he said, “the fellow's crying! A man!”

The sound came directly behind him. There was not a human being in sight. Even policemen do not loiter in empty streets.

“Hello!” he cried. “Where are you?”

But the low, horrible sound went on, and no answer came. His physical sense of the presence of the blister was blotted out by the abnormal thrill of the moment. One had to find out about a thing like that one just had to. One could not go on and leave it behind uninvestigated in the dark and emptiness of a street no one was likely to pass through. He listened more intently. Yes, it was just behind him.

“He's in the lot behind the fence,” he said. “How did he get there?”

He began to walk along the boarding to find a gap. A few yards farther on he came upon a broken place in the inclosure—a place where boards had sagged until they fell down, or had perhaps been pulled down by boys who wanted to get inside. He went through it, and found lie was in the usual vacant lot long given up to rubbish. When he stood still a moment he heard the sobbing again, and followed the sound to the place behind the boarding against which he had supported himself when he took off his boot.

A man was lying on the ground with his arms flung out. The street lamp outside the boarding cast light enough to reveal him. Tembarom felt as though he had suddenly found himself taking part in a melodrama,—“The Streets of New York,” for choice,—though no melodrama had ever given him this slightly shaky feeling. But when a fellow looked up against it as hard as this, what you had to do was to hold your nerve and make him feel he was going to be helped. The normal human thing spoke loud in him.

“Hello, old man!” he said with cheerful awkwardness. “What's hit you?”

The man started and scrambled to his feet as though he were frightened. He was wet, unshaven, white and shuddering, piteous to look at. He stared with wild eyes, his chest heaving.

“What's up?” said Tembarom.

The man's breath caught itself.

“I don't remember.” There was a touch of horror in his voice, though he was evidently making an effort to control him-self. “I can't—I can't remember.” “What's your name? You remember that?” Tembarom put it to him.

“N-n-no!” agonizingly. “If I could! If I could!”

“How did you get in here?”

“I came in because I saw a policeman. He wouldn't understand. He would have stopped me. I must not be stopped. I MUST not.”

“Where were you going?” asked Tembarom, not knowing what else to say.

“Home! My God! man, home!” and he fell to shuddering again. He put his arm against the boarding and dropped his head against it. The low, hideous sobbing tore him again.

T. Tembarom could not stand it. In his newsboy days he had never been able to stand starved dogs and homeless cats. Mrs. Bowse was taking care of a wretched dog for him at the present moment. He had not wanted the poor brute,—he was not particularly fond of dogs,—but it had followed him home, and after he had given it a bone or so, it had licked its chops and turned up its eyes at him with such abject appeal that he had not been able to turn it into the streets again. He was unsentimental, but ruled by primitive emotions. Also he had a sudden recollection of a night when as a little fellow he had gone into a vacant lot and cried as like this as a child could. It was a bad night when some “tough” big boys had turned him out of a warm corner in a shed, and he had had nowhere to go, and being a friendly little fellow, the unfriendliness had hit him hard. The boys had not seen him crying, but he remembered it. He drew near, and put his hand on the shaking shoulder.

“Say, don't do that,” he said. “I'll help you to remember.”

He scarcely knew why he said it. There was something in the situation and in the man himself which was compelling. He was not of the tramp order. His wet clothes had been decent, and his broken, terrified voice was neither coarse nor nasal. He lifted his head and caught Tembarom's arm, clutching it with desperate fingers.

“Could you?” he poured forth the words. “Could you? I'm not quite mad. Something happened. If I could be quiet! Don't let them stop me! My God! my God! my God! I can't say it. It's not far away, but it won't come back. You're a good fellow; if you're human, help me! help me! help me!” He clung to Tembarom with hands which shook; his eyes were more abject than the starved dog's; he choked, and awful tears rolled down his cheeks. “Only help me,” he cried—“just help, help, help—for a while. Perhaps not long. It would come back.” He made a horrible effort. “Listen! My name—I am—I am—it's—”

He was down on the ground again, groveling. His efforts had failed. Tembarom, overwrought himself, caught at him and dragged him up.

“Make a fight,” he said. “You can't lie down like that. You've got to put up a fight. It'll come back. I tell you it will. You've had a clip on the head or something. Let me call an ambulance and take you to the hospital.”

The next moment he was sorry he had said the words, the man's terror was so ill to behold. He grew livid with it, and uttered a low animal cry.

“Don't drop dead over it,” said Tembarom, rather losing his head. “I won't do it, though what in thunder I'm going to do with you I don't know. You can't stay here.”

“For God's sake!” said the man. “For God's sake!” He put his shaking hand on Tembarom again, and looked at him with a bewildered scrutiny. “I'm not afraid of you,” he said; “I don't know why. There's something all right about you. If you'll stand by me—you'd stand by a man, I'd swear. Take me somewhere quiet. Let me get warm and think.”

“The less you think now the better,” answered Tembarom. “You want a bed and a bath and a night's rest. I guess I've let myself in for it. You brush off and brace yourself and come with me.”

There was the hall bedroom and the red-cotton comfort for one night at least, and Mrs. Bowse was a soft-hearted woman. If she'd heard the fellow sobbing behind the fence, she'd have been in a worse fix than he was. Women were kinder-hearted than men, anyhow. The way the fellow's voice sounded when he said, “Help me, help me, help me!” sounded as though he was in hell. “Made me feel as if I was bracing up a chap that was going to be electrocuted,” he thought, feeling sickish again. “I've not got backbone enough to face that sort of thing. Got to take him somewhere.”

They were walking toward the “L” together, and he was wondering what he should say to Mrs. Bowse when he saw his companion fumbling under his coat at the back as though he was in search of something. His hands being unsteady, it took him some moments to get at what he wanted. He evidently had a belt or a hidden pocket. He got something out and stopped under a street light to show it to Tembarom. His hands still shook when he held them out, and his look was a curious, puzzled, questioning one. What he passed over to Tembarom was a roll of money. Tembarom rather lost his breath as he saw the number on two five-hundred-dollar bills, and of several hundreds, besides twenties, tens, and fives.

“Take it—keep it,” he said. “It will pay.”

“Hully gee!” cried Tembarom, aghast. “Don't go giving away your whole pile to the first fellow you meet. I don't want it.”

“Take it.” The stranger put his hand on his shoulder, the abject look in his eyes harrowingly like the starved dog's again.

“There's something all right about you. You'll help me.”

“If I don't take it for you, some one will knock you upon the head for it.” Tembarom hesitated, but the next instant he stuffed it all in his pocket, incited thereto by the sound of a whizzing roar.

“There's the 'L' coming,” he cried; “run for all you're worth.” And they fled up the street and up the steps, and caught it without a second to spare.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER V

At about the time Tembarom made his rush to catch the “L” Joseph Hutchinson was passing through one of his periodical fits of infuriated discouragement. Little Ann knew they would occur every two or three days, and she did not wonder at them. Also she knew that if she merely sat still and listened as she sewed, she would be doing exactly what her mother would have done and what her father would find a sort of irritated comfort in. There was no use in citing people's villainies and calling them names unless you had an audience who would seem to agree to the justice of your accusations.

So Mr. Hutchinson charged up and down the room, his face red, and his hands thrust in his coat pockets. He was giving his opinions of America and Americans, and he spoke with his broadest Manchester accent, and threw in now and then a word or so of Lancashire dialect to add roughness and strength, the angrier a Manchester man being, the broader and therefore the more forcible his accent. “Tha” is somehow a great deal more bitter or humorous or affectionate than the mere ordinary “You” or “Yours.”

“'Merica,” he bellowed—“dang 'Merica! I says—an' dang 'Mericans. Goin' about th' world braggin' an' boastin' about their sharpness an' their open-'andedness. 'Go to 'Merica,' folks'll tell you, 'with an invention, and there's dozens of millionaires ready to put money in it.' Fools!”

“Now, Father,”—Little Ann's voice was as maternal as her mother's had been,—“now, Father, love, don't work yourself up into a passion. You know it's not good for you.”

“I don't need to work myself up into one. I'm in one. A man sells everything he owns to get to 'Merica, an' when he gets there what does he find? He canna' get near a millionaire. He's pushed here an scuffled there, an' told this chap can't see him, an' that chap isn't interested, an' he must wait his chance to catch this one. An' he waits an' waits, an' goes up in elevators an' stands on one leg in lobbies, till he's broke' down an' sick of it, an' has to go home to England steerage.”

Little Ann looked up from her sewing. He had been walking furiously for half an hour, and had been tired to begin with. She had heard his voice break roughly as he said the last words. He threw himself astride a chair and, crossing his arms on the back of it, dropped his head on them. Her mother never allowed this. Her idea was that women were made to tide over such moments for the weaker sex. Far had it been from the mind of Mrs. Hutchinson to call it weaker. “But there's times, Ann, when just for a bit they're just like children. They need comforting without being let to know they are being comforted. You know how it is when your back aches, and some one just slips a pillow under it in the right place without saying anything. That's what women can do if they've got heads. It needs a head.”

Little Ann got up and went to the chair. She began to run her fingers caressingly through the thick, grizzled hair.

“There, Father, love, there!” she said. “We are going back to England, at any rate, aren't we? And grandmother will be so glad to have us with her in her cottage. And America's only one place.”

“I tried it first, dang it!” jerked out Hutchinson. “Every one told me to do it.” He quoted again with derisive scorn: “'You go to 'Merica. 'Merica's the place for a chap like you. 'Merica's the place for inventions.' Liars!”

Little Ann went on rubbing the grizzled head lovingly.

“Well, now we're going back to try England. You never did really try England. And you know how beautiful it'll be in the country, with the primroses in bloom and the young lambs in the fields.” The caressing hand grew even softer. “And you're not going to forget how mother believed in the invention; you can't do that.”

Hutchinson lifted his head and looked at her.

“Eh, Ann,” he said, “you are a comfortable little body. You've got a way with you just like your poor mother had. You always say the right thing to help a chap pull himself together. Your mother did believe in it, didn't she?”

She had, indeed, believed in it, though her faith was founded more upon confidence in “Mr. Hutchinson” than in any profound knowledge of the mechanical appliance his inspiration would supply. She knew it had something important to do with locomotive engines, and she knew that if railroad magnates would condescend to consider it, her husband was sure that fortune would flow in. She had lived with the “invention,” as it was respectfully called, for years.

“That she did,” answered Little Ann. “And before she died she said to me: 'Little Ann,' she said, 'there's one thing you must never let your father do. You must never let him begin not to believe in his invention. Your father's a clever man, and it's a clever invention, and it'll make his fortune yet. You must remind him how I believed in it and how sure I was.'”

Hutchinson rubbed his hands thoughtfully. He had heard this before, but it did him good to hear it again.

“She said that, did she?” he found vague comfort in saying. “She said that?”

“Yes, she did, Father. It was the very day before she died.”

“Well, she never said anything she hadn't thought out,” he said in slow retrospection. “And she had a good head of her own. Eh, she was a wonderful woman, she was, for sticking to things. That was th' Lancashire in her. Lancashire folks knows their own minds.”

“Mother knew hers,” said Ann. “And she always said you knew yours. Come and sit in your own chair, Father, and have your paper.”

She had tided him past the worst currents without letting him slip into them.

“I like folks that knows their own minds,” he said as he sat down and took his paper from her. “You know yours, Ann; and there's that Tembarom chap. He knows his. I've been noticing that chap.” There was a certain pleasure in using a tone of amiable patronage. “He's got a way with him that's worth money to him in business, if he only knew it.”

“I don't think he knows he's got a way,” Little Ann said. “His way is just him.”

“He just gets over people with it, like he got over me. I was ready to knock his head off first time he spoke to me. I was ready to knock anybody's head off that day. I'd just had that letter from Hadman. He made me sick wi' the way he pottered an' played the fool about the invention. He believed in it right enough, but he hadn't the courage of a mouse. He wasn't goin' to be the first one to risk his money. Him, with all he has! He's the very chap to be able to set it goin'. If I could have got some one else to put up brass, it'd have started him. It's want o' backbone, that's the matter wi' Hadman an' his lot.”

“Some of these days some of them 're going to get their eyes open,” said Little Ann, “and then the others will be sorry. Mr. Tembarom says they'll fall over themselves to get in on the ground floor.”

Hutchinson chuckled.

“That's New York,” he said. “He's a rum chap. But he thinks a good bit of the invention. I've talked it over with him, because I've wanted to talk, and the one thing I've noticed about Tembarom is that he can keep his mouth shut.”

“But he talks a good deal,” said Ann.

“That's the best of it. You'd think he was telling all he knows, and he's not by a fat lot. He tells you what you'll like to hear, and he's not sly; but he can keep a shut mouth. That's Lancashire. Some folks can't do it even when they want to.”

“His father came from England.”

“That's where the lad's sense comes from. Perhaps he's Lancashire. He had a lot of good ideas about the way to get at Hadman.”

A knock at the door broke in upon them. Mrs. Bowse presented herself, wearing a novel expression on her face. It was at once puzzled and not altogether disagreeably excited.

“I wish you would come down into the dining-room, Little Ann.” She hesitated. “Mr. Tembaron's brought home such a queer man. He picked him up ill in the street. He wants me to let him stay with him for the night, anyhow. I don't think he's crazy, but I guess he's lost his memory. Queerest thing I ever saw. He doesn't know his name or anything.”

“See here,” broke out Hutchinson, dropping his hands and his paper on his knee, “I'm not going to have Ann goin' down stairs to quiet lunatics.”

“He's as quiet as a child,” Mrs. Bowse protested. “There's something pitiful about him, he seems so frightened. He's drenched to the skin.”

“Call an ambulance and send him to the hospital,” advised Hutchinson.

“That's what Mr. Tembarom says he can't do. It frightens him to death to speak of it. He just clings to Mr. Tembarom sort of awful, as if he thinks he'll save his life. But that isn't all,” she added in an amazed tone; “he's given Mr. Tembarom more than two thousand dollars.”

“What!” shouted Hutchinson, bounding to his feet quite unconsciously.

“What!” exclaimed Little Ann.

“Just you come and look at it,” answered Mrs. Bowse, nodding her head. “There's over two thousand dollars in bills spread out on the table in the dining-room this minute. He had it in a belt pocket, and he dragged it out in the street and would make Mr. Tembarom take it. Do come and tell us what to do.”

“I'd get him to take off his wet clothes and get into bed, and drink some hot spirits and water first,” said Little Ann. “Wouldn't you, Mrs. Bowse?”

Hutchinson got up, newspaper in hand.

“I say, I'd like to go down and have a look at that chap myself,” he announced.

“If he's so frightened, perhaps—” Little Ann hesitated.

“That's it,” put in Mrs. Bowse. “He's so nervous it'd make him worse to see another man. You'd better wait, Mr. Hutchinson.”

Hutchinson sat down rather grumpily, and Mrs. Bowse and Little Ann went down the stairs together.

“I feel real nervous myself,” said Mrs. Bowse, “it's so queer. But he's not crazy. He's quiet enough.”

As they neared the bottom of the staircase Little Ann could see over the balustrade into the dining-room. The strange man was sitting by the table, his disordered, black-haired head on his arm. He looked like an exhausted thing. Tembarom was sitting by him, and was talking in an encouraging voice. He had laid a hand on one of the stranger's. On the table beside them was spread a number of bills which had evidently just been counted.

“Here's the ladies,” said Tembarom.

The stranger lifted his head and, having looked, rose and stood upright, waiting. It was the involuntary, mechanical action of a man who had been trained among gentlemen.

“It's Mrs. Bowse again, and she's brought Miss Hutchinson down with her. Miss Hutchinson always knows what to do,” explained Tembarom in his friendly voice.

The man bowed, and his bewildered eyes fixed themselves on Little Ann.

“Thank you,” he said. “It's very kind of you. I—I am—in great trouble.”

Little Ann went to him and smiled her motherly smile at him.

“You're very wet,” she said. “You'll take a bad cold if you're not careful. Mrs. Bowse thinks you ought to go right to bed and have something hot to drink.”

“It seems a long time since I was in bed,” he answered her.

“I'm very tired. Thank you.” He drew a weary, sighing breath, but he didn't move his eyes from the girl's face. Perhaps the cessation of action in certain cells of his brain had increased action in others. He looked as though he were seeing something in Little Ann's face which might not have revealed itself so clearly to the more normal gaze.

He moved slightly nearer to her. He was a tall man, and had to look down at her.

“What is your name?” he asked anxiously. “Names trouble me.”

It was Ann who drew a little nearer to him now. She had to look up, and the soft, absorbed kindness in her eyes might, Tembarom thought, have soothed a raging lion, it was so intent on its purpose.

“My name is Ann Hutchinson; but never you mind about it now,” she said. “I'll tell it to you again. Let Mr. Tembarom take you up-stairs to bed. You'll be better in the morning.” And because his hollow eyes rested on her so fixedly she put her hand on his wet sleeve.

“You're wet through,” she said. “That won't do.”

He looked down at her hand and then at her face again.

“Help me,” he pleaded, “just help me. I don't know what's happened. Have I gone mad?”

“No,” she answered; “not a bit. It'll all come right after a while; you'll see.”

“Will it, will it?” he begged, and then suddenly his eyes were full of tears. It was a strange thing to see him in his bewildered misery try to pull himself together, and bite his shaking lips as though he vaguely remembered that he was a man. “I beg pardon,” he faltered: “I suppose I'm ill.”

“I don't know where to put him,” Mrs. Bowse was saying half aside; “I've not got a room empty.”

“Put him in my bed and give me a shake-down on the floor,” said Tembarom. “That'll be all right. He doesn't want me to leave him, anyhow.”

He turned to the money on the table.

“Say,” he said to his guest, “there's two thousand five hundred dollars here. We've counted it to make sure. That's quite some money. And it's yours—”

The stranger looked disturbed and made a nervous gesture.

“Don't, don't!” he broke in. “Keep it. Some one took the rest. This was hidden. It will pay.”

“You see he isn't real' out of his mind,” Mrs. Bowse murmured feelingly.

“No, not real' out of it,” said Tembarom. “Say,”—as an inspiration occurred to him,—“I guess maybe Miss Hutchinson will keep it. Will you, Little Ann? You can give it to him when he wants it.”

“It's a good bit of money,” said Little Ann, soberly; “but I can put it in a bank and pay Mrs. Bowse his board every week. Yes, I'll take it. Now he must go to bed. It's a comfortable little room,” she said to the stranger, “and Mrs. Bowse will make you a hot milk-punch. That'll be nourishing.”

“Thank you,” murmured the man, still keeping his yearning eyes on her. “Thank you.”

So he was taken up to the fourth floor and put into Tembarom's bed. The hot milk-punch seemed to take the chill out of him, and when, by lying on his pillow and gazing at the shakedown on the floor as long as he could keep his eyes open, he had convinced himself that Tembarom was going to stay with him, he fell asleep.

Little Ann went back to her father carrying a roll of bills in her hands. It was a roll of such size that Hutchinson started up in his chair and stared at the sight of it.

“Is that the money?” he exclaimed. “What are you going to do with it? What have you found out, lass?”

“Yes, this is it,” she answered. “Mr. Tembarom asked me to take care of it. I'm going to put it in the bank. But we haven't found out anything.”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER VI

His was the opening incident of the series of extraordinary and altogether incongruous events which took place afterwards, as it appeared to T. Tembarom, like scenes in a play in which he had become involved in a manner which one might be inclined to regard humorously and make jokes about, because it was a thousand miles away from anything like real life. That was the way it struck him. The events referred to, it was true, were things one now and then read about in newspapers, but while the world realized that they were actual occurrences, one rather regarded them, when their parallels were reproduced in books and plays, as belonging alone to the world of pure and highly romantic fiction.

“I guess the reason why it seems that way,” he summed it up to Hutchinson and Little Ann, after the worst had come to the worst, “is because we've not only never known any one it's happened to, but we've never known any one that's known any one it's happened to. I've got to own up that it makes me feel as if the fellows'd just yell right out laughing when they heard it.”

The stranger's money had been safely deposited in a bank, and the stranger himself still occupied Tembarom's bedroom. He slept a great deal and was very quiet. With great difficulty Little Ann had persuaded him to let a doctor see him, and the doctor had been much interested in his case. He had expected to find some signs of his having received accidentally or otherwise a blow upon the head, but on examination he found no scar or wound. The condition he was in was frequently the result of concussion of the brain, sometimes of prolonged nervous strain or harrowing mental shock. Such cases occurred not infrequently. Quiet and entire freedom from excitement would do more for such a condition than anything else. If he was afraid of strangers, by all means keep them from him. Tembarom had been quite right in letting him think he would help him to remember, and that somehow he would in the end reach the place he had evidently set out to go to. Nothing must be allowed to excite him. It was well he had had money on his person and that he had fallen into friendly hands. A city hospital would not have been likely to help him greatly. The restraint of its necessary discipline might have alarmed him.

So long as he was persuaded that Tembarom was not going to desert him, he was comparatively calm, though sunk in a piteous and tormented melancholy. His worst hours were when he sat alone in the hall bedroom, with his face buried in his hands. He would so sit without moving or speaking, and Little Ann discovered that at these times he was trying to remember. Sometimes he would suddenly rise and walk about the little room, muttering, with woe in his eyes. Ann, who saw how hard this was for him, found also that to attempt to check or distract him was even worse. When, sitting in her father's room, which was on the other side of the wall, she heard his fretted, hurried pacing feet, her face lost its dimpled cheerfulness. She wondered if her mother would not have discovered some way of clearing the black cloud distracting his brain. Nothing would induce him to go down to the boarders' dining-room for his meals, and the sight of a servant alarmed him so that it was Ann who took him the scant food he would eat. As the time of her return to England with her father drew near, she wondered what Mr. Tembarom would do without her services. It was she who suggested that they must have a name for him, and the name of a part of Manchester had provided one. There was a place called Strangeways, and one night when, in talking to her father, she referred to it in Tembarom's presence, he suddenly seized upon it.

“Strangeways,” he said. “That'd make a good-enough name for him. Let's call him Mr. Strangeways. I don't like the way the fellows have of calling him 'the Freak.'”

So the name had been adopted, and soon became an established fact.

“The way I feel about him,” Tembarom said, “is that the fellow's not a bit of a joke. What I see is that he's up against about the toughest proposition I've ever known. Gee! that fellow's not crazy. He's worse. If he was out-and-out dippy and didn't know it, he'd be all right. Likely as not he'd be thinking he was the Pope of Rome or Anna Held. What knocks him out is that he's just right enough to know he's wrong, and to be trying to get back. He reminds me of one of those chaps the papers tell about sometimes—fellows that go to work in livery-stables for ten years and call themselves Bill Jones, and then wake up some morning and remember they're some high-browed minister of the gospel named the Rev. James Cadwallader.”

When the curtain drew up on Tembarom's amazing drama, Strangeways had been occupying his bed nearly three weeks, and he himself had been sleeping on a cot Mrs. Bowse had put up for him in his room. The Hutchinsons were on the point of sailing for England—steerage—on the steamship Transatlantic, and Tembarom was secretly torn into fragments, though he had done well with the page and he was daring to believe that at the end of the month Galton would tell him he had “made good” and the work would continue indefinitely.

If that happened, he would be raised to “twenty-five per” and would be a man of means. If the Hutchinsons had not been going away, he would have been floating in clouds of rose color. If he could persuade Little Ann to take him in hand when she'd had time to “try him out,” even Hutchinson could not utterly flout a fellow who was making his steady twenty-five per on a big paper, and was on such terms with his boss that he might get other chances. Gee! but he was a fellow that luck just seemed to chase, anyhow! Look at the other chaps, lots of 'em, who knew twice as much as he did, and had lived in decent homes and gone to school and done their darned best, too, and then hadn't been able to get there! It didn't seem fair somehow that he should run into such pure luck.

The day arrived when Galton was to give his decision. Tembarom was going to hand in his page, and while he was naturally a trifle nervous, his nervousness would have been a hopeful and not unpleasant thing but that the Transatlantic sailed in two days, and in the Hutchinson's rooms Little Ann was packing her small trunk and her father's bigger one, which held more models and drawings than clothing. Hutchinson was redder in the face than usual, and indignant condemnation of America and American millionaires possessed his soul. Everybody was rather depressed. One boarder after another had wakened to a realization that, with the passing of Little Ann, Mrs. Bowse's establishment, even with the parlor, the cozy-corner, and the second-hand pianola to support it, would be a deserted-seeming thing. Mrs. Bowse felt the tone of low spirits about the table, and even had a horrible secret fear that certain of her best boarders might decide to go elsewhere, merely to change surroundings from which they missed something. Her eyes were a little red, and she made great efforts to keep things going.

“I can only keep the place up when I've no empty rooms,” she had said to Mrs. Peck, “but I'd have boarded her free if her father would have let her stay. But he wouldn't, and, anyway, she'd no more let him go off alone than she'd jump off Brooklyn Bridge.”

It had been arranged that partly as a farewell banquet and partly to celebrate Galton's decision about the page, there was to be an oyster stew that night in Mr. Hutchinson's room, which was distinguished as a bed-sitting-room. Tembarom had diplomatically suggested it to Mr. Hutchinson. It was to be Tembarom's oyster supper, and somehow he managed to convey that it was only a proper and modest tribute to Mr. Hutchinson himself. First-class oyster stew and pale ale were not so bad when properly suggested, therefore Mr. Hutchinson consented. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger were to come in to share the feast, and Mrs. Bowse had promised to prepare.

It was not an inspiring day for Little Ann. New York had seemed a bewildering and far too noisy place for her when she had come to it directly from her grandmother's cottage in the English village, where she had spent her last three months before leaving England. The dark rooms of the five-storied boarding-house had seemed gloomy enough to her, and she had found it much more difficult to adjust herself to her surroundings than she could have been induced to admit to her father. At first his temper and the open contempt for American habits and institutions which he called “speaking his mind” had given her a great deal of careful steering through shoals to do. At the outset the boarders had resented him, and sometimes had snapped back their own views of England and courts. Violent and disparaging argument had occasionally been imminent, and Mrs. Bowse had worn an ominous look. Their rooms had in fact been “wanted” before their first week had come to an end, and Little Ann herself scarcely knew how she had tided over that situation. But tide it over she did, and by supernatural effort and watchfulness she contrived to soothe Mrs. Bowse until she had been in the house long enough to make friends with people and aid her father to realize that, if they went elsewhere, they might find only the same class of boarders, and there would be the cost of moving to consider. She had beguiled an armchair from Mrs. Bowse, and had recovered it herself with a remnant of crimson stuff secured from a miscellaneous heap at a marked-down sale at a department store. She had arranged his books and papers adroitly and had kept them in their places so that he never felt himself obliged to search for any one of them. With many little contrivances she had given his bed-sitting-room a look of comfort and established homeliness, and he had even begun to like it.

“Tha't just like tha mother, Ann,” he had said. “She'd make a railway station look as if it had been lived in.”

Then Tembarom had appeared, heralded by Mrs. Bowse and the G. Destroyer, and the first time their eyes had met across the table she had liked him. The liking had increased. There was that in his boyish cheer and his not-too-well-fed-looking face which called forth maternal interest. As she gradually learned what his life had been, she felt a thrilled anxiety to hear day by day how he was getting on. She listened for details, and felt it necessary to gather herself together in the face of a slight depression when hopes of Galton were less high than usual. His mending was mysteriously done, and in time he knew with amazed gratitude that he was being “looked after.” His first thanks were so awkward, but so full of appreciation of unaccustomed luxury, that they almost brought tears to her eyes, since they so clearly illuminated the entire novelty of any attention whatever.

“I just don't know what to say,” he said, shuffling from one foot to another, though his nice grin was at its best. “I've never had a woman do anything for me since I was ten. I guess women do lots of things for most fellows; but, then, they're mothers and sisters and aunts. I appreciate it like—like thunder. I feel as if I was Rockefeller, Miss Ann.”

In a short time she had become “Little Ann” to him, as to the rest, and they began to know each other very well. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger had not been able to restrain themselves at first from making slangy, yearning love to her, but Tembarom had been different. He had kept himself well in hand. Yes, she had liked T. Tembarom, and as she packed the trunks she realized that the Atlantic Ocean was three thousand miles across, and when two people who had no money were separated by it, they were likely to remain so. Rich people could travel, poor people couldn't. You just stayed where things took you, and you mustn't be silly enough to expect things to happen in your class of life—things like seeing people again. Your life just went on. She kept herself very busy, and did not allow her thoughts any latitude. It would vex her father very much if he thought she had really grown fond of America and was rather sorry to go away. She had finished her packing before evening, and the trunks were labeled and set aside, some in the outside hall and some in the corner of the room. She had sat down with some mending on her lap, and Hutchinson was walking about the room with the restlessness of the traveler whose approaching journey will not let him settle himself anywhere.

“I'll lay a shilling you've got everything packed and ready, and put just where a chap can lay his hands on it,” he said.

“Yes, Father. Your tweed cap's in the big pocket of your thick topcoat, and there's an extra pair of spectacles and your pipe and tobacco in the small one.”

“And off we go back to England same as we came!” He rubbed his head, and drew a big, worried sigh. “Where's them going?” he asked, pointing to some newly laundered clothing on a side table. “You haven't forgotten 'em, have you?”

“No, Father. It's just some of the young men's washing. I thought I'd take time to mend them up a bit before I went to bed.”

“That's like tha mother, too—taking care of everybody. What did these chaps do before you came?”

“Sometimes they tried to sew on a button or so themselves, but oftener they went without. Men make poor work of sewing. It oughtn't to be expected of them.”

Hutchinson stopped and looked her and her mending over with a touch of curiosity.

“Some of them's Tembarom's?” he asked.

Little Ann held up a pair of socks.

“These are. He does wear them out, poor fellow. It's tramping up and down the streets to save car-fare does it. He's never got a heel to his name. But he's going to be able to buy some new ones next week.”

Hutchinson began his tramp again.

“He'll miss thee, Little Ann; but so'll the other lads, for that matter.”

“He'll know to-night whether Mr. Galton's going to let him keep his work. I do hope he will. I believe he'd begin to get on.”

“Well,”—Hutchinson was just a little grudging even at this comparatively lenient moment,—“I believe the chap'll get on myself. He's got pluck and he's sharp. I never saw him make a poor mouth yet.”

“Neither did I,” answered Ann.

A door leading into Tembarom's hall bedroom opened on to Hutchinson's. They both heard some one inside the room knock at it. Hutchinson turned and listened, jerking his head toward the sound.

“There's that poor chap again,” he said. “He's wakened and got restless. What's Tembarom going to do with him, I'd like to know? The money won't last forever.”

“Shall I let him in, Father? I dare say he's got restless because Mr. Tembarom's not come in.”

“Aye, we'll let him in. He won't have thee long. He can't do no harm so long as I'm here.”

Little Ann went to the door and opened it. She spoke quietly.

“Do you want to come in here, Mr. Strangeways?”

The man came in. He was clean, but still unshaven, and his clothes looked as though he had been lying down. He looked round the room anxiously.

“Where has he gone?” he demanded in an overstrung voice. “Where is he?” He caught at Ann's sleeve in a sudden access of nervous fear. “What shall I do if he's gone?”

Hutchinson moved toward him.

“'Ere, 'ere,” he said, “don't you go catchin' hold of ladies. What do you want?”

“I've forgotten his name now. What shall I do if I can't remember?” faltered Strangeways.

Little Ann patted his arm comfortingly.

“There, there, now! You've not really forgotten it. It's just slipped your memory. You want Mr. Tembarom—Mr. T. Tembarom.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you. That's it. Yes, Tembarom. He said T. Tembarom. He said he wouldn't throw me over.”

Little Ann led him to a seat and made him sit down. She answered him with quiet decision.

“Well, if he said he wouldn't, he won't. Will he, Father?”

“No, he won't.” There was rough good nature in Hutchinson's admission. He paused after it to glance at Ann. “You think a lot of that lad, don't you, Ann?”

“Yes, I do, Father,” she replied undisturbedly. “He's one you can trust, too. He's up-town at his work,” she explained to Strangeways. “He'll be back before long. He's giving us a bit of a supper in here because we're going away.”

Strangeways grew nervous again.

“But he won't go with you? T. Tembarom won't go?”

“No, no; he's not going. He'll stay here,” she said soothingly. He had evidently not observed the packed and labeled trunks when he came in. He seemed suddenly to see them now, and rose in distress.

“Whose are these? You said he wasn't going?”

Ann took hold of his arm and led him to the corner.

“They are not Mr. Tembarom's trunks,” she explained. “They are father's and mine. Look on the labels. Joseph Hutchinson, Liverpool. Ann Hutchinson, Liverpool.”

He looked at them closely in a puzzled way. He read a label aloud in a dragging voice.

“Ann Hutchinson, Liverpool. What's—what's Liverpool?

“Oh, come,” encouraged Little Ann, “you know that. It's a place in England. We're going back to England.”

He stood and gazed fixedly before him. Then he began to rub his fingers across his forehead. Ann knew the straining look in his eyes. He was making that horrible struggle to get back somewhere through the darkness which shut him in. It was so painful a thing to see that even Hutchinson turned slightly away.

“Don't!” said Little Ann, softly, and tried to draw him away.

He caught his breath convulsively once or twice, and his voice dragged out words again, as though he were dragging them from bottomless depths.

“Going—back—to—England—back to England—to England.”

He dropped into a chair near by, his arms thrown over its back, and broke, as his face fell upon them, into heavy, deadly sobbing—the kind of sobbing Tembarom had found it impossible to stand up against. Hutchinson whirled about testily.

“Dang it!” he broke out, “I wish Tembarom'd turn up. What are we to do?” He didn't like it himself. It struck him as unseemly.

But Ann went to the chair, and put her hands on the shuddering shoulder, bending over the soul-wrung creature, the wisdom of centuries in the soft, expostulatory voice which seemed to reach the very darkness he was lost in. It was a wisdom of which she was wholly unaware, but it had been born with her, and was the building of her being.

“'Sh! 'S-h-h!” she said. “You mustn't do that. Mr. Tembarom wouldn't like you to do it. He'll be in directly. 'Sh! 'Sh, now!” And simple as the words were, their soothing reached him. The wildness of his sobs grew less.

“See here,” Hutchinson protested, “this won't do, my man. I won't have it, Ann. I'm upset myself, what with this going back and everything. I can't have a chap coming and crying like that there. It upsets me worse than ever. And you hangin' over him! It won't do.”

Strangeways lifted his head from his arms and looked at him.

“Aye, I mean what I say,” Hutchinson added fretfully.

Strangeways got up from the chair. When he was not bowed or slouching it was to be seen that he was a tall man with square shoulders. Despite his unshaven, haggard face, he had a sort of presence.

“I'll go back to my room,” he said. “I forgot. I ought not to be here.”

Neither Hutchinson nor Little Ann had ever seen any one do the thing he did next. When Ann went with him to the door of the hall bedroom, he took her hand, and bowing low before her, lifted it gently to his lips.

Hutchinson stared at him as he turned into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Well, I've read of lords and ladies doin' that in books,” he said, “but I never thought I should see a chap do it myself.”

Little Ann went back to her mending, looking very thoughtful.

“Father,” she said, after a few moments, “England made him come near to remembering something.”

“New York'll come near making me remember a lot of things when I'm out of it,” said Mr. Hutchinson, sitting down heavily in his chair and rubbing his head. “Eh, dang it! dang it!”

“Don't you let it, Father,” advised Little Ann. “There's never any good in thinking things over.”

“You're not as cheerful yourself as you let on,” he said. “You've not got much color to-day, my lass.”

She rubbed one cheek a little, trying to laugh.

“I shall get it back when we go and stay with grandmother. It's just staying indoors so much. Mr. Tembarom won't be long now; I'll get up and set the table. The things are on a tray outside.”

As she was going out of the room, Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger appeared at the door.

“May we come in?” Jim asked eagerly. “We're invited to the oyster stew, and it's time old T. T. was here. Julius and me are just getting dippy waiting up-stairs to hear if he's made good with Galton.”

“Well, now, you sit down and be quiet a bit, or you'll be losing your appetites,” advised Ann.

“You can't lose a thing the size of mine,” answered Jim, “any more than you could lose the Metropolitan Opera-house.”

Ann turned her head and paused as though she were listening. She heard footsteps in the lower hall.

“He's coming now,” she announced. “I know his step. He's tired. Don't go yet, you two,” she added as the pair prepared to rush to meet him. “When any one's that tired he wants to wash his face, and talk when he's ready. If you'll just go back to your room I'll call you when I've set the table.”

She felt that she wanted a little more quiet during the next few minutes than she could have if they remained and talked at the top of elated voices. She had not quite realized how anxiously she had been waiting all day for the hour when she would hear exactly what had happened. If he was all right, it would be a nice thing to remember when she was in England. In this moderate form she expressed herself mentally. “It would be a nice thing to remember.” She spread the cloth on the table and began to lay out the plates. Involuntarily she found herself stopping to glance at the hall bedroom door and listen rather intently.

“I hope he's got it. I do that. I'm sure he has. He ought to.”

Hutchinson looked over at her. She was that like her mother, that lass!

“You're excited, Ann,” he said.

“Yes, Father, I am—a bit. He's—he's washing his face now.” Sounds of splashing water could be heard through the intervening door.

Hutchinson watched her with some uneasiness.

“You care a lot for that lad,” he said.

She did not look fluttered. Her answer was quite candid.

“I said I did, Father. He's taking off his boots.”

“You know every sound he makes, and you're going away Saturday, and you'll never see him again.”

“That needn't stop me caring. It never did any one any harm to care for one of his sort.”

“But it can't come to anything,” Hutchinson began to bluster. “It won't do—”

“He's coming to the door, he's turning the handle,” said Little Ann.

Tembarom came in. He was fresh with recent face-washing, and his hair was damp, so that a short lock curled and stood up. He had been uptown making frantic efforts for hours, but he had been making them in a spirit of victorious relief, and he did not look tired at all.

“I've got it!” he cried out the moment he entered. “I've got it, by jingo! The job's mine for keeps.”

“Galton's give it to you out and out?” Hutchinson was slightly excited himself.

“He's in the bulliest humor you ever saw. He says I've done first-rate, and if I go on, he'll run me up to thirty.”

“Well, I'm danged glad of it, lad, that I am!” Hutchinson gave in handsomely. “You put backbone into it.”

Little Ann stood near, smiling. Her smile met Tembarom's.

“I know you're glad, Little Ann,” he said. “I'd never have got there but for you. It was up to me, after the way you started me.”

“You know I'm glad without me telling you,” she answered. “I'm RIGHTDOWN glad.”

And it was at this moment that Mrs. Bowse came into the room.

“It's too bad it's happened just now,” she said, much flustered. “That's the way with things. The stew'll spoil, but he says it's real important.”

Tembarom caught at both her hands and shook them.

“I've got it, Mrs. Bowse. Here's your society reporter! The best-looking boarder you've got is going to be able to pay his board steady.”

“I'm as glad as can be, and so will everybody be. I knew you'd get it. But this gentleman's been here twice to-day. He says he really must see you.”

“Let him wait,” Hutchinson ordered. “What's the chap want? The stew won't be fit to eat.”

“No, it won't,” answered Mrs. Bowse; “but he seems to think he's not the kind to be put off. He says it's more Mr. Tembarom's business than his. He looked real mad when I showed him into the parlor, where they were playing the pianola. He asked wasn't there a private room where you could talk.”

A certain flurried interest in the manner of Mrs. Bowse, a something not usually awakened by inopportune callers, an actual suggestion of the possible fact that she was not as indifferent as she was nervous, somewhat awakened Mr. Hutchinson's curiosity.

“Look here,” he volunteered, “if he's got any real business, he can't talk over to the tune of the pianola you can bring him up here, Tembarom. I'll see he don't stay long if his business isn't worth talkin' about. He'll see the table set for supper, and that'll hurry him.”

“Oh, gee I wish he hadn't come!” said Tembarom. “I'll just go down and see what he wants. No one's got any swell private business with me.”

“You bring him up if he has,” said Hutchinson. “We'd like to hear about it.”

Tembarom ran down the stairs quickly.

No one had ever wanted to see him on business before. There was something important-sounding about it; perhaps things were starting up for him in real earnest. It might be a message from Galton, though he could not believe that he had at this early stage reached such a distinction. A ghastly thought shot a bolt at him, but he shook himself free of it.

“He's not a fellow to go back on his word, anyhow,” he insisted.

There were more boarders than usual in the parlor. The young woman from the notion counter had company; and one of her guests was playing “He sut'nly was Good to Me” on the pianola with loud and steady tread of pedal.

The new arrival had evidently not thought it worth his while to commit himself to permanency by taking a seat. He was standing not far from the door with a businesslike-looking envelop in one hand and a pince-nez in the other, with which Tembarom saw he was rather fretfully tapping the envelop as he looked about him. He was plainly taking in the characteristics of the room, and was not leniently disposed toward them. His tailor was clearly an excellent one, with entirely correct ideas as to the cut and material which exactly befitted an elderly gentleman of some impressiveness in the position, whatsoever it happened to be, which he held. His face was not of a friendly type, and his eyes held cold irritation discreetly restrained by businesslike civility. Tembarom vaguely felt the genialities of the oyster supper assume a rather fourth-rate air.

The caller advanced and spoke first.

“Mr. Tembarom?” he inquired.

“Yes,” Tembarom answered, “I'm T. Tembarom.”

“T.,” repeated the stranger, with a slightly puzzled expression. “Ah, yes; I see. I beg pardon.”

In that moment Tembarom felt that he was looked over, taken in, summed up, and without favor. The sharp, steady eye, however, did not seem to have moved from his face. At the same time it had aided him to realize that he was, to this well-dressed person at least, a too exhilarated young man wearing a ten-dollar “hand-me-down.”

“My name is Palford,” he said concisely. “That will convey nothing to you. I am of the firm of Palford & Grimby of Lincoln's Inn. This is my card.”

Tembarom took the card and read that Palford & Grimby were “solicitors,” and he was not sure that he knew exactly what “solicitors” were.

“Lincoln's Inn?” he hesitated. “That's not in New York, is it?”

“No, Mr. Tembarom; in London. I come from England.”

“You must have had bad weather crossing,” said Tembarom, with amiable intent. Somehow Mr. Palford presented a more unyielding surface than he was accustomed to. And yet his hard courtesy was quite perfect.

“I have been here some weeks.”

“I hope you like New York. Won't you have a seat?”

The young lady from the notion counter and her friends began to sing the chorus of “He sut'nly was Good to Me” with quite professional negro accent.

“That's just the way May Irwin done it,” one of them laughed.

Mr. Palford glanced at the performers. He did not say whether he liked New York or not.

“I asked your landlady if we could not see each other in a private room,” he said. “It would not be possible to talk quietly here.”

“We shouldn't have much of a show,” answered Tembarom, inwardly wishing he knew what was going to happen. “But there are no private rooms in the house. We can be quieter than this, though, if we go up stairs to Mr. Hutchinson's room. He said I could bring you.”

“That would be much better,” replied Mr. Palford.

Tembarom led him out of the room, up the first steep and narrow flight of stairs, along the narrow hall to the second, up that, down another hall to the third, up the third, and on to the fourth. As he led the way he realized again that the worn carpets, the steep narrowness, and the pieces of paper unfortunately stripped off the wall at intervals, were being rather counted against him. This man had probably never been in a place like this before in his life, and he didn't take to it.

At the Hutchinsons' door he stopped and explained:

“We were going to have an oyster stew here because the Hutchinsons are going away; but Mr. Hutchinson said we could come up.”

“Very kind of Mr. Hutchinson, I'm sure.”

Despite his stiffly collected bearing, Mr. Palford looked perhaps slightly nervous when he was handed into the bed-sitting-room, and found himself confronting Hutchinson and Little Ann and the table set for the oyster stew. It is true that he had never been in such a place in his life, that for many reasons he was appalled, and that he was beset by a fear that he might be grotesquely compelled by existing circumstances to accept these people's invitation, if they insisted upon his sitting down with them and sharing their oyster stew. One could not calculate on what would happen among these unknown quantities. It might be their idea of boarding-house politeness. And how could one offend them? God forbid that the situation should intensify itself in such an absurdly trying manner! What a bounder the unfortunate young man was! His own experience had not been such as to assist him to any realistic enlightenment regarding him, even when he had seen the society page and had learned that he had charge of it.

“Let me make you acquainted with Mr. and Miss Hutchinson,” Tembarom introduced. “This is Mr. Palford, Mr. Hutchinson.”

Hutchinson, half hidden behind his newspaper, jerked his head and grunted:

“Glad to see you, sir.”

Mr. Palford bowed, and took the chair Tembarom presented.

“I am much obliged to you, Mr. Hutchinson, for allowing me to come to your room. I have business to discuss with Mr. Tembarom, and the pianola was being played down-stairs—rather loudly.”

“They do it every night, dang 'em! Right under my bed,” growled Hutchinson. “You're an Englishman, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I, thank God!” Hutchinson devoutly gave forth.

Little Ann rose from her chair, sewing in hand.

“Father'll come and sit with me in my room,” she said.

Hutchinson looked grumpy. He did not intend to leave the field clear and the stew to its fate if he could help it. He gave Ann a protesting frown.

“I dare say Mr. Palford doesn't mind us,” he said. “We're not strangers.”

“Not in the least,” Palford protested. “Certainly not. If you are old friends, you may be able to assist us.”

“Well, I don't know about that,” Hutchinson answered, “We've not known him long, but we know him pretty well. You come from London, don't you?”

“Yes. From Lincoln's Inn Fields.”

“Law?” grunted Hutchinson.

“Yes. Of the firm of Palford & Grimby.”

Hutchinson moved in his chair involuntarily. There was stimulation to curiosity in this. This chap was a regular top sawyer—clothes, way of pronouncing his words, manners, everything. No mistaking him—old family solicitor sort of chap. What on earth could he have to say to Tembarom? Tembarom himself had sat down and could not be said to look at his ease.

“I do not intrude without the excuse of serious business,” Palford explained to him. “A great deal of careful research and inquiry has finally led me here. I am compelled to believe I have followed the right clue, but I must ask you a few questions. Your name is not really Tembarom, is it?”

Hutchinson looked at Tembarom sharply.

“Not Tembarom? What does he mean, lad?”

Tembarom's grin was at once boyish and ashamed.

“Well, it is in one way,” he answered, “and it isn't in another. The fellows at school got into the way of calling me that way,—to save time, I guess,—and I got to like it. They'd have guyed my real name. Most of them never knew it. I can't see why any one ever called a child by such a fool name, anyhow.”

“What was it exactly?”

Tembarom looked almost sheepish.

“It sounds like a thing in a novel. It was Temple Temple Barholm. Two Temples, by gee! As if one wasn't enough!”

Joseph Hutchinson dropped his paper and almost started from his chair. His red face suddenly became so much redder that he looked a trifle apoplectic.

“Temple Barholm does tha say?” he cried out.

Mr. Palford raised his hand and checked him, but with a suggestion of stiff apology.

“If you will kindly allow me. Did you ever hear your father refer to a place called Temple Barholm?” he inquired.

Tembarom reflected as though sending his thoughts backward into a pretty thoroughly forgotten and ignored past. There had been no reason connected with filial affection which should have caused him to recall memories of his father. They had not liked each other. He had known that he had been resented and looked down upon as a characteristically American product. His father had more than once said he was a “common American lad,” and he had known he was.

“Seems to me,” he said at last, “that once when he was pretty mad at his luck I heard him grumbling about English laws, and he said some of his distant relations were swell people who would never think of speaking to him,—perhaps didn't know he was alive,—and they lived in a big way in a place that was named after the family. He never saw it or them, and he said that was the way in England—one fellow got everything and the rest were paupers like himself. He'd always been poor.”

“Yes, the relation was a distant one. Until this investigation began the family knew nothing of him. The inquiry has been a tiresome one. I trust I am reaching the end of it. We have given nearly two years to following this clue.”

“What for?” burst forth Tembarom, sitting upright.

“Because it was necessary to find either George Temple Barholm or his son, if he had one.”

“I'm his son, all right, but he died when I was eight years old,” Tembarom volunteered. “I don't remember much about him.”

“You remember that he was not an American?”

“He was English. Hated it; but he wasn't fond of America.”

“Have you any papers belonging to him?”

Tembarom hesitated again.

“There's a few old letters—oh, and one of those glass photographs in a case. I believe it's my grandfather and grandmother, taken when they were married. Him on a chair, you know, and her standing with her hand on his shoulder.”

“Can you show them to me?” Palford suggested.

“Sure,” Tembarom answered, getting up from his seat “They're in my room. I turned them up yesterday among some other things.”

When he left them, Mr. Palford sat gently rubbing his chin. Hutchinson wanted to burst forth with questions, but he looked so remote and acidly dignified that there was a suggestion of boldness in the idea of intruding on his reflections. Hutchinson stared at him and breathed hard and short in his suspense. The stiff old chap was thinking things over and putting things together in his lawyer's way. He was entirely oblivious to his surroundings. Little Ann went on with her mending, but she wore her absorbed look, and it was not a result of her work.

Tembarom came back with some papers in his hand. They were yellowed old letters, and on the top of the package there was a worn daguerreotype-case with broken clasp.

“Here they are,” he said, giving them to Palford. “I guess they'd just been married,” opening the case. “Get on to her embroidered collar and big breast-pin with his picture in it. That's English enough, isn't it? He'd given it to her for a wedding-present. There's something in one of the letters about it.”

It was the letters to which Mr. Palford gave the most attention. He read them and examined post-marks and dates. When he had finished, he rose from his chair with a slightly portentous touch of professional ceremony.

“Yes, those are sufficiently convincing. You are a very fortunate young man. Allow me to congratulate you.”

He did not look particularly pleased, though he extended his hand and shook Tembarom's politely. He was rigorously endeavoring to conceal that he found himself called upon to make the best of an extremely bad job. Hutchinson started forward, resting his hands on his knees and glaring with ill-suppressed excitement.

“What's that for?” Tembarom said. He felt rather like a fool. He laughed half nervously. It seemed to be up to him to understand, and he didn't understand in the least.

“You have, through your father's distant relationship, inherited a very magnificent property—the estate of Temple Barholm in Lancashire,” Palford began to explain, but Mr. Hutchinson sprang from his chair outright, crushing his paper in his hand.

“Temple Barholm!” he almost shouted, “I dunnot believe thee! Why, it's one of th' oldest places in England and one of th' biggest. Th' Temple Barholms as didn't come over with th' Conqueror was there before him. Some of them was Saxon kings! And him—” pointing a stumpy, red finger disparagingly at Tembarom, aghast and incredulous—“that New York lad that's sold newspapers in the streets—you say he's come into it?”

“Precisely.” Mr. Palford spoke with some crispness of diction. Noise and bluster annoyed him. “That is my business here. Mr. Tembarom is, in fact, Mr. Temple Temple Barholm of Temple Barholm, which you seem to have heard of.”

“Heard of it! My mother was born in the village an' lives there yet. Art tha struck dumb, lad!” he said almost fiercely to Tembarom. “By Judd! Tha well may be!”

Tembarom was standing holding the back of a chair. He was pale, and had once opened his mouth, and then gulped and shut it. Little Ann had dropped her sewing. His first look had leaped to her, and she had looked back straight into his eyes.

“I'm struck something,” he said, his half-laugh slightly unsteady. “Who'd blame me?”

“You'd better sit down,” said Little Ann. “Sudden things are upsetting.”

He did sit down. He felt rather shaky. He touched himself on his chest and laughed again.

“Me!” he said. “T. T.! Hully gee! It's like a turn at a vaudeville.”

The sentiment prevailing in Hutchinson's mind seemed to verge on indignation.

“Thee th' master of Temple Barholm!” he ejaculated. “Why, it stood for seventy thousand pound' a year!”

“It did and it does,” said Mr. Palford, curtly. He had less and less taste for the situation. There was neither dignity nor proper sentiment in it. The young man was utterly incapable of comprehending the meaning and proportions of the extraordinary event which had befallen him. It appeared to present to him the aspect of a somewhat slangy New York joke.

“You do not seem much impressed, Mr. Temple Barholm,” he said.

“Oh, I'm impressed, all right,” answered Tembarom, “but, say, this thing can't be true! You couldn't make it true if you sat up all night to do it.”

“When I go into the business details of the matter tomorrow morning you will realize the truth of it,” said Mr. Palford. “Seventy thousand pounds a year—and Temple Barholm—are not unsubstantial facts.”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, my lad—that's what it stands for!” put in Mr. Hutchinson.

“Well,” said Tembarom, “I guess I can worry along on that if I try hard enough. I mayn't be able to keep myself in the way I've been used to, but I've got to make it do.”

Mr. Palford stiffened. He did not know that the garish, flippant-sounding joking was the kind of defense the streets of New York had provided Mr. Temple Barholm with in many an hour when he had been a half-clad newsboy with an empty stomach, and a bundle of unsold newspapers under his arm.

“You are jocular,” he said. “I find the New Yorkers are given to being jocular—continuously.”

Tembarom looked at him rather searchingly. Palford wouldn't have found it possible to believe that the young man knew all about his distaste and its near approach to disgust, that he knew quite well what he thought of his ten-dollar suit, his ex-newsboy's diction, and his entire incongruousness as a factor in any circumstances connected with dignity and splendor. He would certainly not have credited the fact that though he had not the remotest idea what sort of a place Temple Barholm was, and what sort of men its long line of possessors had been, he had gained a curious knowledge of their significance through the mental attitude of their legal representative when he for a moment failed to conceal his sense of actual revolt.

“It seems sort of like a joke till you get on to it,” he said. “But I guess it ain't such a merry jest as it seems.”

And then Mr. Palford did begin to observe that he had lost his color entirely; also that he had a rather decent, sharp-cut face, and extremely white and good young teeth, which he showed not unattractively when he smiled. And he smiled frequently, but he was not smiling now.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER VII

In the course of the interview given to the explaining of business and legal detail which took place between Mr. Palford and his client the following morning, Tembarom's knowledge of his situation extended itself largely, and at the same time added in a proportionate degree to his sense of his own incongruity as connected with it. He sat at a table in Palford's private sitting-room at the respectable, old-fashioned hotel the solicitor had chosen—sat and listened, and answered questions and asked them, until his head began to feel as though it were crammed to bursting with extraordinary detail.

It was all extraordinary to him. He had had no time for reading and no books to read, and therefore knew little of fiction. He was entirely ignorant of all romance but such as the New York papers provided. This was highly colored, but it did not deal with events connected with the possessors of vast English estates and the details of their habits and customs. His geographical knowledge of Great Britain was simple and largely incorrect. Information concerning its usual conditions and aspects had come to him through talk of international marriages and cup races, and had made but little impression upon him. He liked New York—its noise, its streets, its glare, its Sunday newspapers, with their ever-increasing number of sheets, and pictures of everything on earth which could be photographed. His choice, when he could allow himself a fifty-cent seat at the theater, naturally ran to productions which were farcical or cheerfully musical. He had never reached serious drama, perhaps because he had never had money enough to pay for entrance to anything like half of the “shows” the other fellows recommended. He was totally unprepared for the facing of any kind of drama as connected with himself. The worst of it was that it struck him as being of the nature of farce when regarded from the normal New York point of view. If he had somehow had the luck to come into the possession of money in ways which were familiar to him,—to “strike it rich” in the way of a “big job” or “deal,”—he would have been better able to adjust himself to circumstances. He might not have known how to spend his money, but he would have spent it in New York on New York joys. There would have been no foreign remoteness about the thing, howsoever fantastically unexpected such fortune might have been. At any rate, in New York he would have known the names of places and things.

Through a large part of his interview with Palford his elbow rested on the table, and he held his chin with his hand and rubbed it thoughtfully. The last Temple Temple Barholm had been an eccentric and uncompanionable person. He had lived alone and had not married. He had cherished a prejudice against the man who would have succeeded him as next of kin if he had not died young. People had been of the opinion that he had disliked him merely because he did not wish to be reminded that some one else must some day inevitably stand in his shoes, and own the possessions of which he himself was arrogantly fond. There were always more female Temple Barholms than male ones, and the families were small. The relative who had emigrated to Brooklyn had been a comparatively unknown person. His only intercourse with the head of the house had been confined to a begging letter, written from America when his circumstances were at their worst. It was an ill-mannered and ill-expressed letter, which had been considered presuming, and had been answered chillingly with a mere five-pound note, clearly explained as a final charity. This begging letter, which bitterly contrasted the writer's poverty with his indifferent relative's luxuries, had, by a curious trick of chance which preserved it, quite extraordinarily turned up during an examination of apparently unimportant, forgotten papers, and had furnished a clue in the search for next of kin. The writer had greatly annoyed old Mr. Temple Barholm by telling him that he had called his son by his name—“not that there was ever likely to be anything in it for him.” But a waif of the New York streets who was known as “Tem” or “Tembarom” was not a link easily attached to any chain, and the search had been long and rather hopeless. It had, however, at last reached Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and before Mr. Palford sat Mr. Temple Temple Barholm, a cheap young man in cheap clothes, and speaking New York slang with a nasal accent. Mr. Palford, feeling him appalling and absolutely without the pale, was still aware that he stood in the position of an important client of the firm of Palford & Grimby. There was a section of the offices at Lincoln's Inn devoted to documents representing a lifetime of attention to the affairs of the Temple Barholm estates. It was greatly to be hoped that the crass ignorance and commonness of this young outsider would not cause impossible complications.

“He knows nothing! He knows nothing!” Palford found himself forced to exclaim mentally not once, but a hundred times, in the course of their talk.

There was—this revealed itself as the interview proceeded—just one slight palliation of his impossible benightedness: he was not the kind of young man who, knowing nothing, huffily protects himself by pretending to know everything. He was of an unreserve concerning his ignorance which his solicitor felt sometimes almost struck one in the face. Now and then it quite made one jump. He was singularly free from any vestige of personal vanity. He was also singularly unready to take offense. To the head of the firm of Palford & Grimby, who was not accustomed to lightness of manner, and inclined to the view that a person who made a joke took rather a liberty with him, his tendency to be jocular, even about himself and the estate of Temple Barholm, was irritating and somewhat disrespectful. Mr. Palford did not easily comprehend jokes of any sort; especially was he annoyed by cryptic phraseology and mammoth exaggeration. For instance, he could not in the least compass Mr. Temple Barholm's meaning when he casually remarked that something or other was “all to the merry”; or again, quite as though he believed that he was using reasonable English figures of speech, “The old fellow thought he was the only pebble on the beach.” In using the latter expression he had been referring to the late Mr. Temple Barholm; but what on earth was his connection with the sea-shore and pebbles? When confronted with these baffling absurdities, Mr. Palford either said, “I beg pardon,” or stiffened and remained silent.

When Tembarom learned that he was the head of one of the oldest families in England, no aspect of the desirable dignity of his position reached him in the least.

“Well,” he remarked, “there's quite a lot of us can go back to Adam and Eve.”

When he was told that he was lord of the manor of Temple Barholm, he did not know what a manor was.

“What's a manor, and what happens if you're lord of it?” he asked.

He had not heard of William the Conqueror, and did not appear moved to admiration of him, though he owned that he seemed to have “put it over.”

“Why didn't he make a republic of it while he was about it?” he said. “But I guess that wasn't his kind. He didn't do all that fighting for his health.”

His interest was not alone totally dissevered from the events of past centuries; it was as dissevered from those of mere past years. The habits, customs, and points of view of five years before seemed to have been cast into a vast waste-paper basket as wholly unpractical in connection with present experiences.

“A man that's going to keep up with the procession can't waste time thinking about yesterday. What he's got to do is to keep his eye on what's going to happen the week after next,” he summed it up.

Rather to Mr. Palford's surprise, he did not speak lightly, but with a sort of inner seriousness. It suggested that he had not arrived at this conclusion without the aid of sharp experience. Now and then one saw a touch of this profound practical perception in him.

It was not to be denied that he was clear-headed enough where purely practical business detail was concerned. He was at first plainly rather stunned by the proportions presented to him, but his questions were direct and of a common-sense order not to be despised.

“I don't know anything about it yet,” he said once. “It's all Dutch to me. I can't calculate in half-crowns and pounds and half pounds, but I'm going to find out. I've got to.”

It was extraordinary and annoying to feel that one must explain everything; but this impossible fellow was not an actual fool on all points, and he did not seem to be a weakling. He might learn certain things in time, and at all events one was no further personally responsible for him and his impossibilities than the business concerns of his estate would oblige any legal firm to be. Clients, whether highly desirable or otherwise, were no more than clients. They were not relatives whom one must introduce to one's friends. Thus Mr. Palford, who was not a specially humane or sympathetic person, mentally decided. He saw no pathos in this raw young man, who would presently find himself floundering unaided in waters utterly unknown to him. There was even a touch of bitter amusement in the solicitor's mind as he glanced toward the future.

He explained with detail the necessity for their immediate departure for the other side of the Atlantic. Certain legal formalities which must at once be attended to demanded their presence in England. Foreseeing this, on the day when he had finally felt himself secure as to the identity of his client he had taken the liberty of engaging optionally certain state-rooms on the Adriana, sailing the following Wednesday.

“Subject of course to your approval,” he added politely. “But it is imperative that we should be on the spot as early as possible.” He did not mention that he himself was abominably tired of his sojourn on alien shores, and wanted to be back in London in his own chambers, with his own club within easy reach.

Tembarom's face changed its expression. He had been looking rather weighted down and fatigued, and he lighted up to eagerness.

“Say,” he exclaimed, “why couldn't we go on the Transatlantic on Saturday?”

“It is one of the small, cheap boats,” objected Palford.

“The accommodation would be most inferior.”

Tembarom leaned forward and touched his sleeve in hasty, boyish appeal.

“I want to go on it,” he said; “I want to go steerage.”

Palford stared at him.

“You want to go on the Transatlantic! Steerage!” he ejaculated, quite aghast. This was a novel order of madness to reveal itself in the recent inheritor of a great fortune.

Tembarom's appeal grew franker; it took on the note of a too crude young fellow's misplaced confidence.

“You do this for me,” he said. “I'd give a farm to go on that boat. The Hutchinsons are sailing on it—Mr. and Miss Hutchinson, the ones you saw at the house last night.”

“I—it is really impossible.” Mr. Palford hesitated. “As to steerage, my dear Mr. Temple Barholm, you—you can't.”

Tembarom got up and stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. It seemed to be a sort of expression of his sudden hopeful excitement.

“Why not” he said. “If I own about half of England and have money to burn, I guess I can buy a steerage passage on a nine-day steamer.”

“You can buy anything you like,” Palford answered stiffly. “It is not a matter of buying. But I should not be conducting myself properly toward you if I allowed it. It would not be—becoming.”

“Becoming!” cried Tembarom, “Thunder! It's not a spring bat. I tell you I want to go just that way.”

Palford saw abnormal breakers ahead. He felt that he would be glad when he had landed his charge safely at Temple Barholm. Once there, his family solicitor was not called upon to live with him and hobnob with his extraordinary intimates.

“As to buying,” he said, still with marked lack of enthusiasm, “instead of taking a steerage passage on the Transatlantic yourself, you might no doubt secure first-class state-rooms for Mr. and Miss Hutchinson on the Adriana, though I seriously advise against it.”

Tembarom shook his head.

“You don't know them,” he said. “They wouldn't let me. Hutchinson's a queer old fellow and he's had the hardest kind of luck, but he's as proud as they make 'em. Me butt in and offer to pay their passage back, as if they were paupers, just because I've suddenly struck it rich! Hully gee! I guess not. A fellow that's been boosted up in the air all in a minute, as I have, has got to lie pretty low to keep folks from wanting to kick him, anyhow. Hutchinson's a darned sight smarter fellow than I am, and he knows it—and he's Lancashire, you bet.” He stopped a minute and flushed. “As to Little Ann,” he said—“me make that sort of a break with HER! Well, I should be a fool.”

Palford was a cold-blooded and unimaginative person, but a long legal experience had built up within him a certain shrewdness of perception. He had naturally glanced once or twice at the girl sitting still at her mending, and he had observed that she said very little and had a singularly quiet, firm little voice.

“I beg pardon. You are probably right. I had very little conversation with either of them. Miss Hutchinson struck me as having an intelligent face.”

“She's a wonder,” said Tembarom, devoutly. “She's just a wonder.”

“Under the circumstances,” suggested Mr. Palford, “it might not be a bad idea to explain to her your idea of the steerage passage. An intelligent girl can often give excellent advice. You will probably have an opportunity of speaking to her tonight. Did you say they were sailing to-morrow?”

To-morrow! That brought it so near that it gave Tembarom a shock. He had known that they sailed on Saturday, and now Saturday had become to-morrow. Things began to surge through his mind—all sorts of things he had no time to think of clearly, though it was true they had darted vaguely about in the delirious excitement of the night, during which he had scarcely slept at all. His face changed again, and the appeal died out of it. He began to look anxious and restless.

“Yes, they're going to-morrow,” he answered.

“You see,” argued Mr. Palford, with conviction, “how impossible it would be for us to make any arrangements in so few hours. You will excuse my saying,” he added punctiliously, “that I could not make the voyage in the steerage.”

Tembarom laughed. He thought he saw him doing it.

“That's so,” he said. Then, with renewed hope, he added, “Say, I 'm going to try and get them to wait till Wednesday.”

“I do not think—” Mr. Palford began, and then felt it wiser to leave things as they were. “But I'm not qualified to give an opinion. I do not know Miss Hutchinson at all.”

But the statement was by no means frank. He had a private conviction that he did know her to a certain degree. And he did.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER VIII

There was a slight awkwardness even to Tembarom in entering the dining-room that evening. He had not seen his fellow boarders, as his restless night had made him sleep later than usual. But Mrs. Bowse had told him of the excitement he had caused.

“They just couldn't eat,” she said. “They could do nothing but talk and talk and ask questions; and I had waffles, too, and they got stone-cold.”

The babel of friendly outcry which broke out on his entry was made up of jokes, ejaculations, questions, and congratulatory outbursts from all sides.

“Good old T. T.!” “Give him a Harvard yell! Rah! Rah! Rah!” “Lend me fifty-five cents?” “Where's your tiara?” “Darned glad of it!” “Make us a speech!”

“Say, people,” said Tembarom, “don't you get me rattled or I can't tell you anything. I'm rattled enough already.”

“Well, is it true?” called out Mr. Striper.

“No,” Tembarom answered back, sitting down. “It couldn't be; that's what I told Palford. I shall wake up in a minute or two and find myself in a hospital with a peacherino of a trained nurse smoothing 'me piller.' You can't fool ME with a pipe-dream like this. Palford's easier; he's not a New Yorker. He says it IS true, and I can't get out of it.”

“Whew! Great Jakes!” A long breath was exhaled all round the table.

“What are you, anyhow?” cried Jim Bowles across the dishes.

Tembarom rested his elbow on the edge of the table and began to check off his points on his fingers.

“I'm this,” he said: “I'm Temple Temple Barholm, Esquire, of Temple Barholm, Lancashire, England. At the time of the flood my folks knocked up a house just about where the ark landed, and I guess they've held on to it ever since. I don't know what business they went into, but they made money. Palford swears I've got three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I wasn't going to call the man a liar; but I just missed it, by jings!”

He was trying to “bluff it out.” Somehow he felt he had to. He felt it more than ever when a momentary silence fell upon those who sat about the table. It fell when he said “three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.” No one could find voice to make any remark for a few seconds after that.

“Are you a lord—or a duke?” some one asked after breath had recovered itself.

“No, I'm not,” he replied with relief. “I just got out from under that; but the Lord knows how I did it.”

“What are you going to do first?” said Jim Bowles.

“I've got to go and 'take possession.' That's what Palford calls it. I've been a lost heir for nearly two years, and I've got to show myself.”

Hutchinson had not joined the clamor of greeting, but had grunted disapproval more than once. He felt that, as an Englishman, he had a certain dignity to maintain. He knew something about big estates and their owners. He was not like these common New York chaps, who regarded them as Arabian Nights tales to make jokes about. He had grown up as a village boy in proper awe of Temple Barholm. They were ignorant fools, this lot. He had no patience with them. He had left the village and gone to work in Manchester when he was a boy of twelve, but as long as he had remained in his mother's cottage it had been only decent good manners for him to touch his forehead respectfully when a Temple Barholm, or a Temple Barholm guest or carriage or pony phaeton, passed him by. And this chap was Mr. Temple Temple Barholm himself! Lord save us!

Little Ann said nothing at all; but, then, she seldom said anything during meal-times. When the rest of the boarders laughed, she ate her dinner and smiled. Several times, despite her caution, Tembarom caught her eye, and somehow held it a second with his. She smiled at him when this happened; but there was something restless and eager in his look which made her wish to evade it. She knew what he felt, and she knew why he kept up his jokes and never once spoke seriously. She knew he was not comfortable, and did not enjoy talking about hundreds of thousands a year to people who worked hard for ten or twenty “per.” To-morrow morning was very near, she kept thinking. To-morrow night she would be lying in her berth in the steerage, or more probably taking care of her father, who would be very uncomfortable.

“What will Galton do?” Mr. Striper asked.

“I don't know,” Tembarom answered, and he looked troubled. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year might not be able to give aid to a wounded society page.

“What are you going to do with your Freak?” called out Julius Steinberger.

Tembarom actually started. As things had surged over him, he had had too much to think over. He had not had time to give to his strange responsibility; it had become one nevertheless.

“Are you going to leave him behind when you go to England?”

He leaned forward and put his chin on his hand.

“Why, say,” he said, as though he were thinking it out, “he's spoken about England two or three times. He's said he must go there. By jings! I'll take him with me, and see what'll happen.”

When Little Ann got up to leave the room he followed her and her father into the hall.

“May I come up and talk it over with you?” he appealed. “I've got to talk to some one who knows something about it. I shall go dotty if I don't. It's too much like a dream.”

“Come on up when you're ready,” answered Hutchinson. “Ann and me can give you a tip or two.”

“I'm going to be putting the last things in the trunks,” said Ann, “but I dare say you won't mind that. The express'll be here by eight in the morning.”

“O Lord!” groaned Tembarom.

When he went up to the fourth floor a little later, Hutchinson had fallen into a doze in his chair over his newspaper, and Ann was kneeling by a trunk in the hall, folding small articles tightly, and fitting them into corners. To Tembarom she looked even more than usual like a slight child thing one could snatch up in one's arms and carry about or set on one's knee without feeling her weight at all. An inferior gas-jet on the wall just above her was doing its best with the lot of soft, red hair, which would have been an untidy bundle if it had not been hers.

Tembarom sat down on the trunk next to her.

“O Little Ann!” he broke out under his breath, lest the sound of his voice might check Hutchinson's steady snoring. “O Little Ann!”

Ann leaned back, sitting upon her small heels, and looked up at him.

“You're all upset, and it's not to be wondered at, Mr. Temple Barholm,” she said.

“Upset! You're going away to-morrow morning! And, for the Lord's sake, don't call me that!” he protested.

“You're going away yourself next Wednesday. And you ARE Mr. Temple Barholm. You'll never be called anything else in England.

“How am I going to stand it?” he protested again. “How could a fellow like me stand it! To be yanked out of good old New York, and set down in a place like a museum, with Central Park round it, and called Mr. Temple Temple Barholm instead of just 'Tem' or 'T. T.'! It's not natural.”

“What you must do, Mr. Temple Barholm, is to keep your head clear, that's all,” she replied maturely.

“Lord! if I'd got a head like yours!”

She seemed to take him in, with a benign appreciativeness, in his entirety.

“Well, you haven't,” she admitted, though quite without disparagement, merely with slight reservation. “But you've got one like your own. And it's a good head—when you try to think steady. Yours is a man's head, and mine's only a woman's.”

“It's Little Ann Hutchinson's, by gee!” said Tembarom, with feeling.

“Listen here, Mr. Tem—Temple Barholm,” she went on, as nearly disturbed as he had ever seen her outwardly. “It's a wonderful thing that's happened to you. It's like a novel. That splendid place, that splendid name! It seems so queer to think I should ever have talked to a Mr. Temple Barholm as I've talked to you.”

He leaned forward a little as though something drew him.

“But”—there was unsteady appeal in his voice—“you have liked me, haven't you, Little Ann?”

Her own voice seemed to drop into an extra quietness that made it remote. She looked down at her hands on her lap.

“Yes, I have liked you. I have told Father I liked you,” she answered.

He got up, and made an impetuous rush at his goal.

“Then—say, I'm going in there to wake up Mr. Hutchinson and ask him not to sail to-morrow morning.”

“You'd better not wake him up,” she answered, smiling; but he saw that her face changed and flushed. “It's not a good time to ask Father anything when he's just been waked up. And we HAVE to go. The express is coming at eight.”

“Send it away again; tell 'em you're not going. Tell 'em any old thing. Little Ann, what's the matter with you? Something's the matter. Have I made a break?”

He had felt the remoteness in her even before he had heard it in her dropped voice. It had been vaguely there even when he sat down on the trunk. Actually there was a touch of reserve about her, as though she was keeping her little place with the self-respecting propriety of a girl speaking to a man not of her own world.

“I dare say I've done some fool thing without knowing it. I don't know where I'm at, anyhow,” he said woefully.

“Don't look at me like that, Mr. Temple Barholm,” she said—“as if I was unkind. I—I'm NOT.”

“But you're different,” he implored. “I saw it the minute I came up. I ran up-stairs just crazy to talk to you,—yes, crazy to talk to you—and you—well, you were different. Why are you, if you're not mad?”

Then she rose and stood holding one of her neatly rolled packages in her hand. Her eyes were soft and clear, and appealed maternally to his reason.

“Because everything's different. You just think a bit,” she answered.

He stared at her a few seconds, and then understanding of her dawned upon him. He made a human young dash at her, and caught her arm.

“What!” he cried out. “You mean this Temple Barholm song and dance makes things different? Not on your life! You're not the girl to work that on me, as if it was my fault. You've got to hear me speak my piece. Ann—you've just got to!”

He had begun to tremble a little, and she herself was not steady; but she put a hand on his arm.

“Don't say anything you've not had time to think about,” she said.

“I've been thinking of pretty near nothing else ever since I came here. Just as soon as I looked at you across the table that first day I saw my finish, and every day made me surer. I'd never had any comfort or taking care of,—I didn't know the first thing about it,—and it seemed as if all there was of it in the world was just in YOU.”

“Did you think that?” she asked falteringly.

“Did I? That's how you looked to me, and it's how you look now. The way you go about taking care of everybody and just handing out solid little chunks of good sense to every darned fool that needs them, why—” There was a break in his voice—“why, it just knocked me out the first round.” He held her a little away from him, so that he could yearn over her, though he did not know he was yearning. “See, I'd sworn I'd never ask a girl to marry me until I could keep her. Well, you know how it was, Ann. I couldn't have kept a goat, and I wasn't such a fool that I didn't know it. I've been pretty sick when I thought how it was; but I never worried you, did I?”

“No, you didn't.”

“I just got busy. I worked like—well, I got busier than I ever was in my life. When I got the page SURE, I let myself go a bit, sort of hoping. And then this Temple Barholm thing hits me.”

“That's the thing you've got to think of now,” said Little Ann. “I'm going to talk sensible to you.”

“Don't, Ann! Good Lord! DON'T!”

“I MUST.” She put her last tight roll into the trunk and tried to shut the lid. “Please lock this for me.”

He locked it, and then she seated herself on the top of it, though it was rather high for her, and her small feet dangled. Her eyes looked large and moist like a baby's, and she took out a handkerchief and lightly touched them.

“You've made me want to cry a bit,” she said, “but I'm not going to.”

“Are you going to tell me you don't want me?” he asked, with anxious eyes.

“No, I'm not.”

“God bless you!” He was going to make a dash at her again, but pulled himself up because he must. “No, by jings!” he said. “I'm not going to till you let me.”

“You see, it's true your head's not like mine,” she said reasonably. “Men's heads are mostly not like women's. They're men, of course, and they're superior to women, but they're what I'd call more fluttery-like. Women must remind them of things.”

“What—what kind of things?”

“This kind. You see, Grandmother lives near Temple Barholm, and I know what it's like, and you don't. And I've seen what seventy thousand pounds a year means, and you haven't. And you've got to go and find out for yourself.”

“What's the matter with you coming along to help me?”

“I shouldn't help you; that's it. I should hold you back. I'm nothing but Ann Hutchinson, and I talk Manchester—and I drop my h's.”

“I love to hear you drop your little h's all over the place,” he burst forth impetuously. “I love it.”

She shook her head.

“The girls that go to garden-parties at Temple Barholm look like those in the `Ladies' Pictorial', and they've got names and titles same as those in novels.”

He answered her in genuine anguish. He had never made any mistake about her character, and she was beginning to make him feel afraid of her in the midst of his adoration.

“What do I want with a girl out of a magazine?” he cried. “Where should I hang her up?”

She was not unfeeling, but unshaken and she went on:

“I should look like a housemaid among them. How would you feel with a wife of that sort, when the other sort was about?”

“I should feel like a king, that's what I should feel like,” he replied indignantly.

“I shouldn't feel like a queen. I should feel MISERABLE.”

She sat with her little feet dangling, and her hands folded in her lap. Her infantile blue eyes held him as the Ancient Mariner had been held. He could not get away from the clear directness of them. He did not want to exactly, but she frightened him more and more.

“I should be ashamed,” she proceeded. “I should feel as if I had taken an advantage. What you've got to do is to find out something no one else can find out for you, Mr. Temple Barholm.”

“How can I find it out without you? It was you who put me on to the wedding-cake; you can put me on to other things.”

“Because I've lived in the place,” she answered unswervingly. “I know how funny it is for any one to think of me being Mrs. Temple Barholm. You don't.”

“You bet I don't,” he answered; “but I'll tell you what I do know, and that's how funny it is that I should be Mr. Temple Barholm. I've got on to that all right, all right. Have you?”

She looked at him with a reflection that said much. She took him in with a judicial summing up of which it must be owned an added respect was part. She had always believed he had more sense than most young men, and now she knew it.

“When a person's clever enough to see things for himself, he's generally clever enough to manage them,” she replied.

He knelt down beside the trunk and took both her hands in his. He held them fast and rather hard.

“Are you throwing me down for good, Little Ann?” he said. “If you are, I can't stand it, I won't stand it.”

“If you care about me like that, you'll do what I tell you,” she interrupted, and she slipped down from the top of her trunk. “I know what Mother would say. She'd say, 'Ann, you give that young man a chance.' And I'm going to give you one. I've said all I'm going to, Mr. Temple Barholm.”

He took both her elbows and looked at her closely, feeling a somewhat awed conviction.

“I—believe—you have,” he said.

And here the sound of Mr. Hutchinson's loud and stertorous breathing ceased, and he waked up, and came to the door to find out what Ann was doing.

“What are you two talking about?” he asked. “People think when they whisper it's not going to disturb anybody, but it's worse than shouting in a man's ear.”

Tembarom walked into the room.

“I've been asking Little Ann to marry me,” he announced, “and she won't.”

He sat down in a chair helplessly, and let his head fall into his hands.

“Eh!” exclaimed Hutchinson. He turned and looked at Ann disturbedly. “I thought a bit ago tha didn't deny but what tha'd took to him?”

“I didn't, Father,” she answered. “I don't change my mind that quick. I—would have been willing to say 'Yes' when you wouldn't have been willing to let me. I didn't know he was Mr. Temple Barholm then.”

Hutchinson rubbed the back of his head, reddening and rather bristling.

“Dost tha think th' Temple Barholms would look down on thee?”

“I should look down on myself if I took him up at his first words, when he's all upset with excitement, and hasn't had time to find out what things mean. I'm—well, I 'm too fond of him, Father.”

Hutchinson gave her a long, steady look.

“You are?” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

Tembarom lifted his head, and looked at her, too.

“Are you?” he asked.

She put her hands behind her back, and returned his look with the calm of ages.

“I'm not going to argue about it,” she answered. “Arguing's silly.”

His involuntary rising and standing before her was a sort of unconscious tribute of respect.

“I know that,” he owned. “I know you. That's why I take it like this. But I want you to tell me one thing. If this hadn't happened, if I'd only had twenty dollars a week, would you have taken me?”

“If you'd had fifteen, and Father could have spared me, I'd have taken you. Fifteen dollars a week is three pounds two and sixpence, and I've known curates' wives that had to bring up families on less. It wouldn't go as far in New York as it would in the country in England, but we could have made it do—until you got more. I know you, too, Mr. Temple Barholm.”

He turned to her father, and saw in his florid countenance that which spurred him to bold disclosure.

“Say,” he put it to him, as man to man, “she stands there and says a thing like that, and she expects a fellow not to jerk her into his arms and squeeze the life out of her! I daren't do it, and I'm not going to try; but—well, you said her mother was like her, and I guess you know what I'm up against.”

Hutchinson's grunting chuckle contained implications of exultant tenderness and gratified paternal pride.

“She's th' very spit and image of her mother,” he said, “and she had th' sense of ten women rolled into one, and th' love of twenty. You let her be, and you're as safe as th' Rock of Ages.”

“Do you think I don't know that?” answered Tembarom, his eyes shining almost to moisture. “But what hits me, by thunder! is that I've lost the chance of seeing her work out that fifteen-dollar-a-week proposition, and it drives me crazy.”

“I should have downright liked to try it,” said Little Ann, with speculative reflection, and while she knitted her brows in lovely consideration of the attractive problem, several previously unknown dimples declared themselves about her mouth.

“Ann,” Tembarom ventured, “if I go to Temple Barholm and try it a year and learn all about it—-”

“It would take more than a year,” said Ann.

“Don't make it two,” Tembarom pleaded. “I'll sit up at night with wet towels round my head to learn; I'll spend fourteen hours a day with girls that look like the pictures in the `Ladies' Pictorial', or whatever it is in England; I'll give them every chance in life, if you'll let me off afterward. There must be another lost heir somewhere; let's dig him up and then come back to little old New York and be happy. Gee! Ann,”—letting himself go and drawing nearer to her,—“how happy we could be in one of those little flats in Harlem!”

She was a warm little human thing, and a tender one, and when he came close to her, glowing with tempestuous boyish eagerness, her eyes grew bluer because they were suddenly wet, and she was obliged to move softly back.

“Yes,” she said; “I know those little flats. Any one could—-” She stopped herself, because she had been going to reveal what a home a woman could make in rooms like the compartments in a workbox. She knew and saw it all. She drew back a little again, but she put out a hand and laid it on his sleeve.

“When you've had quite time enough to find out, and know what the other thing means, I'll do whatever you want me to do,” she said. “It won't matter what it is. I'll do it.”

“She means that,” Hutchinson mumbled unsteadily, turning aside. “Same as her mother would have meant it. And she means it in more ways than one.”

And so she did. The promise included quite firmly the possibility of not unnatural changes in himself such as young ardor could not foresee, even the possibility of his new life withdrawing him entirely from the plane on which rapture could materialize on twenty dollars a week in a flat in Harlem.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER IX

Type as exotic as Tembarom's was to his solicitor naturally suggested problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an English youth who had been brought up in the streets would have been one of two or three things. He would have been secretly terrified and resentful, roughly awkward and resentful, or boastfully delighted and given to a common youth's excitedly common swagger at finding himself suddenly a “swell.”

This special kind of youth would most assuredly have constantly thought of himself as a “swell” and would have lost his head altogether, possibly with results in the matter of conduct in public which would have been either maddening or crushing to the spirit of a well-bred, mature-minded legal gentleman temporarily thrust into the position of bear-leader.

But Tembarom was none of these things. If he was terrified, he did not reveal his anguish. He was without doubt not resentful, but on the contrary interested and curious, though he could not be said to bear himself as one elated. He indulged in no frolics or extravagances. He saw the Hutchinsons off on their steamer, and supplied them with fruit and flowers and books with respectful moderation. He did not conduct himself as a benefactor bestowing unknown luxuries, but as a young man on whom unexpected luck had bestowed decent opportunities to express his friendship. In fact, Palford's taste approved of his attitude. He was evidently much under the spell of the slight girl with the Manchester accent and sober blue eyes, but she was neither flighty nor meretricious, and would have sense enough to give no trouble even when he naturally forgot her in the revelations of his new life. Her father also was plainly a respectable working-man, with a blunt Lancashire pride which would keep him from intruding.

“You can't butt in and get fresh with a man like that,” Tembarom said. “Money wouldn't help you. He's too independent.”

After the steamer had sailed away it was observable to his solicitor that Mr. Temple Barholm was apparently occupied every hour. He did not explain why he seemed to rush from one part of New York to another and why he seemed to be seeking interviews with persons it was plainly difficult to get at. He was evidently working hard to accomplish something or other before he left the United States, perhaps. He asked some astutely practical business questions; his intention seeming to be to gain a definite knowledge of what his future resources would be and of his freedom to use them as he chose.

Once or twice Mr. Palford was rather alarmed by the tendency of his questions. Had he actually some prodigious American scheme in view? He seemed too young and inexperienced in the handling of large sums for such a possibility. But youth and inexperience and suddenly inherited wealth not infrequently led to rash adventures. Something which Palford called “very handsome” was done for Mrs. Bowse and the boarding-house. Mrs. Bowse was evidently not proud enough to resent being made secure for a few years' rent. The extraordinary page was provided for after a large amount of effort and expenditure of energy.

“I couldn't leave Galton high and dry,” Tembarom explained when he came in after rushing about. “I think I know a man he might try, but I've got to find him and put him on to things. Good Lord! nobody rushed about to find me and offer me the job. I hope this fellow wants it as bad as I did. He'll be up in the air.” He discovered the whereabouts of the young man in question, and finding him, as the youngster almost tearfully declared, “about down and out,” his proposition was met with the gratitude the relief from a prospect of something extremely like starvation would mentally produce. Tembarom took him to Galton after having talked him over in detail.

“He's had an education, and you know how much I'd had when I butted into the page,” he said. “No one but you would have let me try it. You did it only because you saw—you saw—”

“Yes, I saw,” answered Galton, who knew exactly what he had seen and who found his up-town social representative and his new situation as interesting as amusing and just touched with the pathetic element. Galton was a traveled man and knew England and several other countries well.

“You saw that a fellow wanted the job as much as I did would be likely to put up a good fight to hold it down. I was scared out of my life when I started out that morning of the blizzard, but I couldn't afford to be scared. I guess soldiers who are scared fight like that when they see bayonets coming at them. You have to.”

“I wonder how often a man finds out that he does pretty big things when bayonets are coming at him,” answered Galton, who was actually neglecting his work for a few minutes so that he might look at and talk to him, this New York descendant of Norman lords and Saxon kings.

“Joe Bennett had been trying to live off free-lunch counters for a week when I found him,” Tembarom explained. “You don't know what that is. He'll go at the page all right. I'm going to take him up-town and introduce him to my friends there and get them to boost him along.”

“You made friends,” said Galton. “I knew you would.”

“Some of the best ever. Good-natured and open-handed. Well, you bet! Only trouble was they wanted you to eat and drink everything in sight, and they didn't quite like it when you couldn't get outside all the champagne they'd offer you.”

He broke into a big, pleased laugh.

“When I went in and told Munsberg he pretty near threw a fit. Of course he thought I was kidding. But when I made him believe it, he was as glad as if he'd had luck himself. It was just fine the way people took it. Tell you what, it takes good luck, or bad luck, to show you how good-natured a lot of folks are. They'll treat Bennett and the page all right; you'll see.”

“They'll miss you,” said Galton.

“I shall miss them,” Tembarom answered in a voice with a rather depressed drop in it.

“I shall miss you,” said Galton.

Tembarom's face reddened a little.

“I guess it'd seem rather fresh for me to tell you how I shall miss you,” he said. “I said that first day that I didn't know how to tell you how I—well, how I felt about you giving a mutt like me that big chance. You never thought I didn't know how little I did know, did you?” he inquired almost anxiously.

“That was it—that you did know and that you had the backbone and the good spirits to go in and win,” Galton replied. “I'm a tired man, and good spirits and good temper seem to me about the biggest assets a man can bring into a thing. I shouldn't have dared do it when I was your age. You deserved the Victoria Cross,” he added, chuckling.

“What's the Victoria Cross?” asked Tembarom.

“You'll find out when you go to England.”

“Well, I'm not supposing that you don't know about how many billion things I'll have to find out when I go to England.”

“There will be several thousand,” replied Galton moderately; “but you'll learn about them as you go on.”

“Say,” said Tembarom, reflectively, “doesn't it seem queer to think of a fellow having to keep up his spirits because he's fallen into three hundred and fifty thousand a year? You wouldn't think he'd have to, would you?”

“But you find he has?” queried Galton, interestedly.

Tembarom's lifted eyes were so honest that they were touching.

“I don't know where I'm at,” he said. “I'm going to wake up in a new place—like people that die. If you knew what it was like, you wouldn't mind it so much; but you don't know a blamed thing. It's not having seen a sample that rattles you.”

“You're fond of New York?”

“Good Lord! it's all the place I know on earth, and it's just about good enough for me, by gee! It's kept me alive when it might have starved me to death. My! I've had good times here,” he added, flushing with emotion. “Good times—when I hadn't a whole meal a day!”

“You'd have good times anywhere,” commented Galton, also with feeling. “You carry them over your shoulder, and you share them with a lot of other people.”

He certainly shared some with Joe Bennett, whom he took up-town and introduced right and left to his friendly patrons, who, excited by the atmosphere of adventure and prosperity, received him with open arms. To have been the choice of T. Tembarom as a mere representative of the EARTH would have been a great thing for Bennett, but to be the choice of the hero of a romance of wildest opulence was a tremendous send-off. He was accepted at once, and when Tembarom actually “stood for” a big farewell supper of his own in “The Hall,” and nearly had his hand shaken off by congratulating acquaintances, the fact that he kept the new aspirant by his side, so that the waves of high popularity flowed over him until he sometimes lost his joyful breath, established him as a sort of hero himself.

Mr. Palford did not know of this festivity, as he also found he was not told of several other things. This he counted as a feature of his client's exoticism. His extraordinary lack of concealment of things vanity forbids many from confessing combined itself with a quite cheerful power to keep his own counsel when he was, for reasons of his own, so inclined.

“He can keep his mouth shut, that chap,” Hutchinson had said once, and Mr. Palford remembered it. “Most of us can't. I've got a notion I can; but I don't many's the time when I should. There's a lot more in him than you'd think for. He's naught but a lad, but he is na half such a fool as he looks.”

He was neither hesitant nor timid, Mr. Palford observed. In an entirely unostentatious way he soon realized that his money gave things into his hands. He knew he could do most things he chose to do, and that the power to do them rested in these days with himself without the necessity of detailed explanation or appeal to others, as in the case, for instance, of this mysterious friend or protege whose name was Strangeways. Of the history of his acquaintance with him Palford knew nothing, and that he should choose to burden himself with a half-witted invalid—in these terms the solicitor described him—was simply in-explainable. If he had asked for advice or by his manner left an opening for the offering of it, he would have been most strongly counseled to take him to a public asylum and leave him there; but advice on the subject seemed the last thing he desired or anticipated, and talk about his friend was what he seemed least likely to indulge in. He made no secret of his intentions, but he frankly took charge of them as his own special business, and left the rest alone.

“Say nothing and saw wood,” Palford had once been a trifle puzzled by hearing him remark casually, and he remembered it later, as he remembered the comments of Joseph Hutchinson. Tembarom had explained himself to Little Ann.

“You'll understand,” he said. “It is like this. I guess I feel like you do when a dog or a cat in big trouble just looks at you as if you were all they had, and they know if you don't stick by them they'll be killed, and it just drives them crazy. It's the way they look at you that you can't stand. I believe something would burst in that fellow's brain if I left him. When he found out I was going to do it he'd just let out some awful kind of a yell I'd remember till I died. I dried right up almost as soon as I spoke of him to Palford. He couldn't see anything but that he was crazy and ought to be put in an asylum. Well, he's not. There're times when he talks to me almost sensible; only he's always so awful low down in his mind you're afraid to let him go on. And he's a little bit better than he was. It seems queer to get to like a man that's sort of dotty, but I tell you, Ann, because you'll understand—I've got to sort of like him, and want to see if I can work it out for him somehow. England seems to sort of stick in his mind. If I can't spend my money in living the way I want to live,—buying jewelry and clothes for the girl I'd like to see dressed like a queen—I'm going to do this just to please myself. I'm going to take him to England and keep him quiet and see what'll happen. Those big doctors ought to know about all there is to know, and I can pay them any old thing they want. By jings! isn't it the limit—to sit here and say that and know it's true!”

Beyond the explaining of necessary detail to him and piloting him to England, Mr. Palford did not hold himself many degrees responsible. His theory of correct conduct assumed no form of altruism. He had formulated it even before he reached middle age. One of his fixed rules was to avoid the error of allowing sympathy or sentiment to hamper him with any unnecessary burden. Natural tendency of temperament had placed no obstacles in the way of his keeping this rule. To burden himself with the instruction or modification of this unfortunately hopeless young New Yorker would be unnecessary. Palford's summing up of him was that he was of a type with which nothing palliative could be done. There he was. As unavoidable circumstances forced one to take him,—commonness, slanginess, appalling ignorance, and all,—one could not leave him. Fortunately, no respectable legal firm need hold itself sponsor for a “next of kin” provided by fate and the wilds of America.

The Temple Barholm estate had never, in Mr. Palford's generation, been specially agreeable to deal with. The late Mr. Temple Temple Barholm had been a client of eccentric and abominable temper. Interviews with him had been avoided as much as possible. His domineering insolence of bearing had at times been on the verge of precipitating unheard-of actions, because it was almost more than gentlemanly legal flesh and blood could bear. And now appeared this young man.

He rushed about New York strenuously attending to business concerning himself and his extraordinary acquaintances, and on the day of the steamer's sailing he presented himself at the last moment in an obviously just purchased suit of horribly cut clothes. At all events, their cut was horrible in the eyes of Mr. Palford, who accepted no cut but that of a West End tailor. They were badly made things enough, because they were unconsidered garments that Tembarom had barely found time to snatch from a “ready-made” counter at the last moment. He had been too much “rushed” by other things to remember that he must have them until almost too late to get them at all. He bought them merely because they were clothes, and warm enough to make a voyage in. He possessed a monster ulster, in which, to Mr. Palford's mind, he looked like a flashy black-leg. He did not know it was flashy. His opportunities for cultivating a refined taste in the matter of wardrobe had been limited, and he had wasted no time in fastidious consideration or regrets. Palford did him some injustice in taking it for granted that his choice of costume was the result of deliberate bad taste. It was really not choice at all. He neither liked his clothes nor disliked them. He had been told he needed warm garments, and he had accepted the advice of the first salesman who took charge of him when he dropped into the big department store he was most familiar with because it was the cheapest in town. Even when it was no longer necessary to be cheap, it was time-saving and easy to go into a place one knew.

The fact that he was as he was, and that they were the subjects of comment and objects of unabated interest through-out the voyage, that it was proper that they should be companions at table and on deck, filled Mr. Palford with annoyed unease.

Of course every one on board was familiar with the story of the discovery of the lost heir. The newspapers had reveled in it, and had woven romances about it which might well have caused the deceased Mr. Temple Barholm to turn in his grave. After the first day Tembarom had been picked out from among the less-exciting passengers, and when he walked the deck, books were lowered into laps or eyes followed him over their edges. His steamer-chair being placed in a prominent position next to that of a pretty, effusive Southern woman, the mother of three daughters whose eyes and eyelashes attracted attention at the distance of a deck's length, he was without undue delay provided with acquaintances who were prepared to fill his every moment with entertainment.

“The three Gazelles,” as their mother playfully confided to Tembarom her daughters were called in Charleston, were destructively lovely. They were swaying reeds of grace, and being in radiant spirits at the prospect of “going to Europe,” were companions to lure a man to any desperate lengths. They laughed incessantly, as though they were chimes of silver bells; they had magnolia-petal skins which neither wind nor sun blemished; they had nice young manners, and soft moods in which their gazelle eyes melted and glowed and their long lashes drooped. They could dance, they played on guitars, and they sang. They were as adorable as they were lovely and gay.

“If a fellow was going to fall in love,” Tembarom said to Palford, “there'd be no way out of this for him unless he climbed the rigging and dragged his food up in a basket till he got to Liverpool. If he didn't go crazy about Irene, he'd wake up raving about Honora; and if he got away from Honora, Adelia Louise would have him `down on the mat.'” From which Mr. Palford argued that the impression made by the little Miss Hutchinson with the Manchester accent had not yet had time to obliterate itself.

The Gazelles were of generous Southern spirit, and did not surround their prize with any barrier of precautions against other young persons of charm. They introduced him to one girl after another, and in a day or two he was the center of animated circles whenever he appeard. The singular thing, however, was that he did not appear as often as the other men who were on board. He seemed to stay a great deal with Strangeways, who shared his suite of rooms and never came on deck. Sometimes the Gazelles prettily reproached him. Adelia Louise suggested to the others that his lack of advantages in the past had made him feel rather awkward and embarrassed; but Palford knew he was not embarrassed. He accepted his own limitations too simply to be disturbed by them. Palford would have been extremely bored by him if he had been of the type of young outsider who is anxiouus about himself and expansive in self-revelation and appeals for advice; but sometimes Tembarom's air of frankness, which was really the least expansive thing in the world and revealed nothing whatever, besides concealing everything it chose, made him feel himself almost irritatingly baffled. It would have been more natural if he had not been able to keep anything to himself and had really talked too much.

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CHAPTER X

The necessary business in London having been transacted, Tembarom went north to take possession of the home of his forefathers. It had rained for two days before he left London, and it rained steadily all the way to Lancashire, and was raining steadily when he reached Temple Barholm. He had never seen such rain before. It was the quiet, unmoved persistence of it which amazed him. As he sat in the railroad carriage and watched the slanting lines of its unabating downpour, he felt that Mr. Palford must inevitably make some remark upon it. But Mr. Palford continued to read his newspapers undisturbedly, as though the condition of atmosphere surrounding him were entirely accustomed and natural. It was of course necessary and proper that he should accompany his client to his destination, but the circumstances of the case made the whole situation quite abnormal. Throughout the centuries each Temple Barholm had succeeded to his estate in a natural and conventional manner. He had either been welcomed or resented by his neighbors, his tenants, and his family, and proper and fitting ceremonies had been observed. But here was an heir whom nobody knew, whose very existence nobody had even suspected, a young man who had been an outcast in the streets of the huge American city of which lurid descriptions are given. Even in New York he could have produced no circle other than Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and the objects of interest to the up-town page, so he brought no one with him; for Strangeways seemed to have been mysteriously disposed of after their arrival in London.

Never had Palford & Grimby on their hands a client who seemed so entirely alone. What, Mr. Palford asked himself, would he do in the enormity of Temple Barholm, which always struck one as being a place almost without limit. But that, after all, was neither here nor there. There he was. You cannot undertake to provide a man with relatives if he has none, or with acquaintances if people do not want to know him. His past having been so extraordinary, the neighborhood would naturally be rather shy of him. At first, through mere force of custom and respect for an old name, punctilious, if somewhat alarmed, politeness would be shown by most people; but after the first calls all would depend upon how much people could stand of the man himself.

The aspect of the country on a wet winter's day was not enlivening. The leafless and dripping hedges looked like bundles of sticks; the huge trees, which in June would be majestic bowers of greenery, now held out great skeleton arms, which seemed to menace both earth and sky. Heavy-faced laborers tramped along muddy lanes; cottages with soaked bits of dead gardens looked like hovels; big, melancholy cart-horses, dragging jolting carts along the country roads, hung their heads as they splashed through the mire.

As Tembarom had known few persons who had ever been out of America, he had not heard that England was beautiful, and he saw nothing which led him to suspect its charms. London had impressed him as gloomy, dirty, and behind the times despite its pretensions; the country struck him as “the limit.” Hully gee! was he going to be expected to spend his life in this! Should he be obliged to spend his life in it. He'd find that out pretty quick, and then, if there was no hard-and-fast law against it, him for little old New York again, if he had to give up the whole thing and live on ten per. If he had been a certain kind of youth, his discontent would have got the better of him, and he might have talked a good deal to Mr. Palford and said many disparaging things.

“But the man was born here,” he reflected. “I guess he doesn't know anything else, and thinks it's all right. I've heard of English fellows who didn't like New York. He looks like that kind.”

He had supplied himself with newspapers and tried to read them. Their contents were as unexciting as the rain-sodden landscape. There were no head-lines likely to arrest any man's attention. There was a lot about Parliament and the Court, and one of them had a column or two about what lords and ladies were doing, a sort of English up-town or down-town page.

He knew the stuff, but there was no snap in it, and there were no photographs or descriptions of dresses. Galton would have turned it down. He could never have made good if he had done no better than that. He grinned to himself when he read that the king had taken a drive and that a baby prince had the measles.

“I wonder what they'd think of the Sunday Earth,” he mentally inquired.

He would have been much at sea if he had discovered what they really would have thought of it. They passed through smoke-vomiting manufacturing towns, where he saw many legs seemingly bearing about umbrellas, but few entire people; they whizzed smoothly past drenched suburbs, wet woodlands, and endless-looking brown moors, covered with dead bracken and bare and prickly gorse. He thought these last great desolate stretches worse than all the rest.

But the railroad carriage was luxuriously upholstered and comfortable, though one could not walk about and stretch his legs. In the afternoon, Mr. Palford ordered in tea, and plainly expected him to drink two cups and eat thin bread and butter. He felt inclined to laugh, though the tea was all right, and so was the bread and butter, and he did not fail his companion in any respect. The inclination to laugh was aroused by the thought of what Jim Bowles and Julius would say if they could see old T. T. with nothing to do at 4:30 but put in cream and sugar, as though he were at a tea-party on Fifth Avenue.

But, gee! this rain did give him the Willies. If he was going to be sorry for himself, he might begin right now. But he wasn't. He was going to see this thing through.

The train had been continuing its smooth whir through fields, wooded lands, and queer, dead-and-alive little villages for some time before it drew up at last at a small station. Bereft by the season of its garden bloom and green creepers, it looked a bare and uninviting little place. On the two benches against the wall of the platform a number of women sat huddled together in the dampness. Several of them held children in their laps and all stared very hard, nudging one another as he descended from the train. A number of rustics stood about the platform, giving it a somewhat crowded air. It struck Tembarom that, for an out-of-the-way place, there seemed to be a good many travelers, and he wondered if they could all be going away. He did not know that they were the curious element among such as lived in the immediate neighborhood of the station and had come out merely to see him on his first appearance. Several of them touched their hats as he went by, and he supposed they knew Palford and were saluting him. Each of them was curious, but no one was in a particularly welcoming mood. There was, indeed, no reason for anticipating enthusiasm. It was, however, but human nature that the bucolic mind should bestir itself a little in the desire to obtain a view of a Temple Barholm who had earned his living by blacking boots and selling newspapers, unknowing that he was “one o' th' gentry.”

When he stepped from his first-class carriage, Tembarom found himself confronted by a very straight, clean-faced, and well-built young man, who wore a long, fawn-colored livery coat with claret facings and silver buttons. He touched his cockaded hat, and at once took up the Gladstone bags. Tembarom knew that he was a footman because he had seen something like him outside restaurants, theaters, and shops in New York, but he was not sure whether he ought to touch his own hat or not. He slightly lifted it from his head to show there was no ill feeling, and then followed him and Mr. Palford to the carriage waiting for them. It was a severe but sumptuous equipage, and the coachman was as well dressed and well built as the footman. Tembarom took his place in it with many mental reservations.

“What are the illustrations on the doors?” he inquired.

“The Temple Barholm coat of arms,” Mr. Palford answered. “The people at the station are your tenants. Members of the family of the stout man with the broad hat have lived as yeoman farmers on your land for three hundred years.”

They went on their way, with more rain, more rain, more dripping hedges, more soaked fields, and more bare, huge-armed trees. CLOP, CLOP, CLOP, sounded the horses' hoofs along the road, and from his corner of the carriage Mr. Palford tried to make polite conversation. Faces peered out of the windows of the cottages, sometimes a whole family group of faces, all crowded together, eager to look, from the mother with a baby in her arms to the old man or woman, plainly grandfather or grandmother—sharp, childishly round, or bleared old eyes, all excited and anxious to catch glimpses.

“They are very curious to see you,” said Mr. Palford. “Those two laborers are touching their hats to you. It will be as well to recognize their salute.”

At a number of the cottage doors the group stood upon the threshold and touched foreheads or curtsied. Tembarom saluted again and again, and more than once his friendly grin showed itself. It made him feel queer to drive along, turning from side to side to acknowledge obeisances, as he had seen a well-known military hero acknowledge them as he drove down Broadway.

The chief street of the village of Temple Barholm wandered almost within hailing distance of the great entrance to the park. The gates were supported by massive pillars, on which crouched huge stone griffins. Tembarom felt that they stared savagely over his head as he was driven toward them as for inspection, and in disdainful silence allowed to pass between them as they stood on guard, apparently with the haughtiest mental reservations.

The park through which the long avenue rolled concealed its beauty to the unaccustomed eye, showing only more bare trees and sodden stretches of brown grass. The house itself, as it loomed up out of the thickening rain-mist, appalled Tembarom by its size and gloomily gray massiveness. Before it was spread a broad terrace of stone, guarded by more griffins of even more disdainful aspect than those watching over the gates. The stone noses held themselves rigidly in the air as the reporter of the up-town society page passed with Mr. Palford up a flight of steps broad enough to make him feel as though he were going to church. Footmen with powdered heads received him at the carriage door, seemed to assist him to move, to put one foot before the other for him, to stand in rows as though they were a military guard ready to take him into custody.

Then he was inside, standing in an enormous hall filled with furnishings such as he had never seen or heard of before. Carved oak, suits of armor, stone urns, portraits, another flight of church steps mounting upward to surrounding galleries, stained-glass windows, tigers' and lions' heads, horns of tremendous size, strange and beautiful weapons, suggested to him that the dream he had been living in for weeks had never before been so much a dream. He had walked about as in a vision, but among familiar surroundings. Mrs. Bowse's boarders and his hall bedroom had helped him to retain some hold over actual existence. But here the reverently saluting villagers staring at him through windows as though he were General Grant, the huge, stone entrance, the drive of what seemed to be ten miles through the park, the gloomy mass of architecture looming up, the regiment of liveried men-servants, with respectfully lowered but excitedly curious eyes, the dark and solemn richness inclosing and claiming him—all this created an atmosphere wholly unreal. As he had not known books, its parallel had not been suggested to him by literature. He had literally not heard that such things existed. Selling newspapers and giving every moment to the struggle for life or living, one did not come within the range of splendors. He had indeed awakened in that other world of which he had spoken. And though he had heard that there was another world, he had had neither time nor opportunity to make mental pictures of it. His life so far had expressed itself in another language of figures. The fact that he had in his veins the blood of the Norman lords and Saxon kings may or may not have had something to do with the fact that he was not abashed, but bewildered. The same factor may or may not have aided him to preserve a certain stoic, outward composure. Who knows what remote influences express themselves in common acts of modern common life? As Cassivellaunus observed his surroundings as he followed in captive chains his conqueror's triumphal car through the streets of Rome, so the keen-eyed product of New York pavement life “took in” all about him. Existence had forced upon him the habit of sharp observance. The fundamental working law of things had expressed itself in the simple colloquialism, “Keep your eye skinned, and don't give yourself away.” In what phrases the parallel of this concise advice formulated itself in 55 B.C. no classic has yet exactly informed us, but doubtless something like it was said in ancient Rome. Tembarom did not give himself away, and he took rapid, if uncertain, inventory of people and things. He remarked, for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant was totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it, but also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person addressed to hesitate or resent. It was a subtle thing, and Tembarom wondered how he did it.

They were shown into a room the walls of which seemed built of books; the furniture was rich and grave and luxuriously comfortable. A fire blazed as well as glowed in a fine chimney, and a table near it was set with a glitter of splendid silver urn and equipage for tea.

“Mrs. Butterworth was afraid you might not have been able to get tea, sir,” said the man-servant, who did not wear livery, but whose butler's air of established authority was more impressive than any fawn color and claret enriched with silver could have encompassed.

Tea again? Perhaps one was obliged to drink it at regular intervals. Tembarom for a moment did not awaken to the fact that the man was speaking to him, as the master from whom orders came. He glanced at Mr. Palford.

“Mr. Temple Barholm had tea after we left Crowly,” Mr. Palford said. “He will no doubt wish to go to his room at once, Burrill.”

“Yes, sir,” said Burrill, with that note of entire absence of comment with which Tembarom later became familiar. “Pearson is waiting.”

It was not unnatural to wonder who Pearson was and why he was waiting, but Tembarom knew he would find out. There was a slight relief on realizing that tea was not imperative. He and Mr. Palford were led through the hall again. The carriage had rolled away, and two footmen, who were talking confidentially together, at once stood at attention. The staircase was more imposing as one mounted it than it appeared as one looked at it from below. Its breadth made Tembarom wish to lay a hand on a balustrade, which seemed a mile away. He had never particularly wished to touch balustrades before. At the head of the first flight hung an enormous piece of tapestry, its forest and hunters and falconers awakening Tembarom's curiosity, as it looked wholly unlike any picture he had ever seen in a shop-window. There were pictures everywhere, and none of them looked like chromos. Most of the people in the portraits were in fancy dress. Rumors of a New York millionaire ball had given him some vague idea of fancy dress. A lot of them looked like freaks. He caught glimpses of corridors lighted by curious, high, deep windows with leaded panes. It struck him that there was no end to the place, and that there must be rooms enough in it for a hotel.

“The tapestry chamber, of course, Burrill,” he heard Mr. Palford say in a low tone.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Temple Barholm always used it.”

A few yards farther on a door stood open, revealing an immense room, rich and gloomy with tapestry-covered walls and dark oak furniture. A bed which looked to Tembarom incredibly big, with its carved oak canopy and massive posts, had a presiding personality of its own. It was mounted by steps, and its hangings and coverlid were of embossed velvet, time-softened to the perfection of purples and blues. A fire enriched the color of everything, and did its best to drive the shadows away. Deep windows opened either into the leafless boughs of close-growing trees or upon outspread spaces of heavily timbered park, where gaunt, though magnificent, bare branches menaced and defied. A slim, neat young man, with a rather pale face and a touch of anxiety in his expression, came forward at once.

“This is Pearson, who will valet you,” exclaimed Mr. Palford.

“Thank you, sir,” said Pearson in a low, respectful voice. His manner was correctness itself.

There seemed to Mr. Palford to be really nothing else to say. He wanted, in fact, to get to his own apartment and have a hot bath and a rest before dinner.

“Where am I, Burrill?” he inquired as he turned to go down the corridor.

“The crimson room, sir,” answered Burrill, and he closed the door of the tapestry chamber and shut Tembarom in alone with Pearson.

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CHAPTER XI

For a few moments the two young men looked at each other, Pearson's gaze being one of respectfulness which hoped to propitiate, if propitiation was necessary, though Pearson greatly trusted it was not. Tembarom's was the gaze of hasty investigation and inquiry. He suddenly thought that it would have been “all to the merry” if somebody had “put him on to” a sort of idea of what was done to a fellow when he was “valeted.” A valet, he had of course gathered, waited on one somehow and looked after one's clothes. But were there by chance other things he expected to do,—manicure one's nails or cut one's hair,—and how often did he do it, and was this the day? He was evidently there to do something, or he wouldn't have been waiting behind the door to pounce out the minute he appeared, and when the other two went away, Burrill wouldn't have closed the door as solemnly as though he shut the pair of them in together to get through some sort of performance.

“Here's where T. T. begins to feel like a fool,” he thought. “And here's where there's no way out of looking like one. I don't know a thing.”

But personal vanity was not so strong in him as healthy and normal good temper. Despite the fact that the neat correctness of Pearson's style and the finished expression of his neat face suggested that he was of a class which knew with the most finished exactness all that custom and propriety demanded on any occasion on which “valeting” in its most occult branches might be done, he was only “another fellow,” after all, and must be human. So Tembarom smiled at him.

“Hello, Pearson,” he said. “How are you?”

Pearson slightly started. It was the tiniest possible start, quite involuntary, from which he recovered instantly, to reply in a tone of respectful gratefulness:

“Thank you, sir, very well; thank you, sir.”

“That's all right,” answered Tembarom, a sense of relief because he'd “got started” increasing the friendliness of his smile. “I see you got my trunk open,” he said, glancing at some articles of clothing neatly arranged upon the bed.

Pearson was slightly alarmed. It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps it was not the custom in America to open a gentleman's box and lay out his clothes for him. For special reasons he was desperately anxious to keep his place, and above all things he felt he must avoid giving offense by doing things which, by being too English, might seem to cast shades of doubt on the entire correctness of the customs of America. He had known ill feeling to arise between “gentlemen's gentlemen” in the servants' hall in the case of slight differences in customs, contested with a bitterness of feeling which had made them almost an international question. There had naturally been a great deal of talk about the new Mr. Temple Barholm and what might be expected of him. When a gentleman was not a gentleman,—this was the form of expression in “the hall,”—the Lord only knew what would happen. And this one, who had, for all one knew, been born in a workhouse, and had been a boot-black kicked about in American streets,—they did not know Tembarom,—and nearly starved to death, and found at last in a low lodging-house, what could he know about decent living? And ten to one he'd be American enough to swagger and bluster and pretend he knew everything better than any one else, and lose his temper frightfully when he made mistakes, and try to make other people seem to blame. Set a beggar on horseback, and who didn't know what he was? There were chances enough and to spare that not one of them would be able to stand it, and that in a month's time they would all be looking for new places.

So while Tembarom was rather afraid of Pearson and moved about in an awful state of uncertainty, Pearson was horribly afraid of Tembarom, and was, in fact, in such a condition of nervous anxiety that he was obliged more than once furtively to apply to his damp, pale young forehead his exceedingly fresh and spotless pocket-handkerchief.

In the first place, there was the wardrobe. What COULD he do? How could he approach the subject with sufficient delicacy? Mr. Temple Barholm had brought with him only a steamer trunk and a Gladstone bag, the latter evidently bought in London, to be stuffed with hastily purchased handkerchiefs and shirts, worn as they came out of the shop, and as evidently bought without the slightest idea of the kind of linen a gentleman should own. What most terrified Pearson, who was of a timid and most delicate-minded nature, was that having the workhouse and the boot-blacking as a background, the new Mr. Temple Barholm COULDN'T know, as all this had come upon him so suddenly. And was it to be Pearson's calamitous duty to explain to him that he had NOTHING, that he apparently KNEW nothing, and that as he had no friends who knew, a mere common servant must educate him, if he did not wish to see him derided and looked down upon and actually “cut” by gentlemen that WERE gentlemen? All this to say nothing of Pearson's own well-earned reputation for knowledge of custom, intelligence, and deftness in turning out the objects of his care in such form as to be a reference in themselves when a new place was wanted. Of course sometimes there were even real gentlemen who were most careless and indifferent to appearance, and who, if left to themselves, would buy garments which made the blood run cold when one realized that his own character and hopes for the future often depended upon his latest employer's outward aspect. But the ulster in which Mr. Temple Barholm had presented himself was of a cut and material such as Pearson's most discouraged moments had never forced him to contemplate. The limited wardrobe in the steamer trunk was all new and all equally bad. There was no evening dress, no proper linen,—not what Pearson called “proper,”—no proper toilet appurtenances. What was Pearson called upon by duty to do? If he had only had the initiative to anticipate this, he might have asked permission to consult in darkest secrecy with Mr. Palford. But he had never dreamed of such a situation, and apparently he would be obliged to send his new charge down to his first dinner in the majestically decorous dining-room, “before all the servants,” in a sort of speckled tweed cutaway, with a brown necktie.

Tembarom, realizing without delay that Pearson did not expect to be talked to and being cheered by the sight of the fire, sat down before it in an easy-chair the like of which for luxurious comfort he had never known. He was, in fact, waiting for developments. Pearson would say or do something shortly which would give him a chance to “catch on,” or perhaps he'd go out of the room and leave him to himself, which would be a thing to thank God for. Then he could wash his face and hands, brush his hair, and wait till the dinner-bell rang. They'd be likely to have one. They'd have to in a place like this.

But Pearson did not go out of the room. He moved about behind him for a short time with footfall so almost entirely soundless that Tembarom became aware that, if it went on long, he should be nervous; in fact, he was nervous already. He wanted to know what he was doing. He could scarcely resist the temptation to turn his head and look; but he did not want to give himself away more entirely than was unavoidable, and, besides, instinct told him that he might frighten Pearson, who looked frightened enough, in a neat and well-mannered way, already. Hully gee! how he wished he would go out of the room!

But he did not. There were gently gliding footsteps of Pearson behind him, quiet movements which would have seemed stealthy if they had been a burglar's, soft removals of articles from one part of the room to another, delicate brushings, and almost noiseless foldings. Now Pearson was near the bed, now he had opened a wardrobe, now he was looking into the steamer trunk, now he had stopped somewhere behind him, within a few yards of his chair. Why had he ceased moving? What was he looking at? What kept him quiet?

Tembarom expected him to begin stirring mysteriously again; but he did not. Why did he not? There reigned in the room entire silence; no soft footfalls, no brushing, no folding. Was he doing nothing? Had he got hold of something which had given him a fit? There had been no sound of a fall; but perhaps even if an English valet had a fit, he'd have it so quietly and respectfully that one wouldn't hear it. Tembarom felt that he must be looking at the back of his head, and he wondered what was the matter with it. Was his hair cut in a way so un-English that it had paralyzed him? The back of his head began to creep under an investigation so prolonged. No sound at all, no movement. Tembarom stealthily took out his watch—good old Waterbury he wasn't going to part with—and began to watch the minute-hand. If nothing happened in three minutes he was going to turn round. One—two—three—and the silence made it seem fifteen. He returned his Waterbury to his pocket and turned round.

Pearson was not dead. He was standing quite still and resigned, waiting. It was his business to wait, not to intrude or disturb, and having put everything in order and done all he could do, he was waiting for further commands—in some suspense, it must be admitted.

“Hello!” exclaimed Tembarom, involuntarily.

“Shall I get your bath ready, sir?” inquired Pearson. “Do you like it hot or cold, sir?”

Tembarom drew a relieved breath. He hadn't dropped dead and he hadn't had a fit, and here was one of the things a man did when he valeted you—he got your bath ready. A hasty recollection of the much-used, paint-smeared tin bath on the fourth floor of Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house sprang up before him. Everybody had to use it in turn, and you waited hours for the chance to make a dash into it. No one stood still and waited fifteen minutes until you got good and ready to tell him he could go and turn on the water. Gee whizz!

Being relieved himself, he relieved Pearson by telling him he might “fix it” for him, and that he would have hot water.

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Pearson, and silently left the room.

Then Tembarom got up from his chair and began to walk about rather restlessly. A new alarm seized him. Did Pearson expect to WASH him or to stand round and hand him soap and towels and things while he washed himself?

If it was supposed that you hadn't the strength to turn the faucets yourself, it might be supposed you didn't have the energy to use a flesh-brush and towels. Did valeting include a kind of shampoo all over?

“I couldn't stand for that,” he said. “I'd have to tell him there'd been no Turkish baths in mine, and I'm not trained up to them. When I've got on to this kind of thing a bit more, I'll make him understand what I'm NOT in for; but I don't want to scare the life out of him right off. He looks like a good little fellow.”

But Pearson's duties as valet did not apparently include giving him his bath by sheer physical force. He was deft, calm, amenable. He led Tembarom down the corridor to the bath-room, revealed to him stores of sumptuous bath-robes and towels, hot-and cold-water faucets, sprays, and tonic essences. He forgot nothing and, having prepared all, mutely vanished, and returned to the bedroom to wait—and gaze in troubled wonder at the speckled tweed cutaway. There was an appalling possibility—he was aware that he was entirely ignorant of American customs—that tweed was the fashionable home evening wear in the States. Tembarom, returning from his bath much refreshed after a warm plunge and a cold shower, evidently felt that as a costume it was all that could be desired.

“Will you wear—these, sir,—this evening?” Pearson suggested.

It was suggestive of more than actual inquiry. If he had dared to hope that his manner might suggest a number of things! For instance, that in England gentlemen really didn't wear tweed in the evening even in private. That through some unforeseen circumstances his employer's evening-dress suit had been delayed, but would of course arrive to-morrow!

But Tembarom, physically stimulated by hot and cold water, and relief at being left alone, was beginning to recover his natural buoyancy.

“Yes, I'll wear 'em,” he answered, snatching at his hairbrush and beginning to brush his damp hair. It was a wooden-backed brush that Pearson had found in his Gladstone bag and shudderingly laid in readiness on the dressing-table. “I guess they're all right, ain't they?”

“Oh, quite right, sir, quite,” Pearson ventured—“for morning wear.”

“Morning?” said Tembarom, brushing vigorously. “Not night?”

“Black, sir,” most delicately hinted Pearson, “is—more usual—in the evening—in England.” After which he added, “So to speak,” with a vague hope that the mollifying phrase might counteract the effect of any apparently implied aspersion on colors preferred in America.

Tembarom ceased brushing his hair, and looked at him in good-natured desire for information.

“Frock-coats or claw-hammer?” he asked. Despite his natural anxiety, and in the midst of it, Pearson could not but admit that he had an uncondemnatory voice and a sort of young way with him which gave one courage. But he was not quite sure of “claw-hammer.”