Front matter (continued 5)

My heart went out to the boy as I saw him merge and lose himself in the crowd; I felt very tenderly not only toward those of my flesh, but to all young things facing the hurly-burly of this oddly jumbled sphere.

I was becoming an ogler in my old age. Every young girl I saw in the streets, in cars, at crossings, I scrutinized searchingly, with painful leapings of the heart, when any of them in the slightest particular resembled Alicia. And the melancholy truth came to me that you can build a life to any design you please, but only a miracle will keep it intact.

Visconti was in the office when I arrived and he was kindness itself when he saw my face.

"Caro mio!" he grasped my hand. "Something serious?"

"Some domestic trouble—a little painful," I stammered, and he saw that I did not wish to speak of it. And the vast loneliness of human beings traversing their orbits on earth struck me as I sat heavily down to my work. What did I know of Visconti—or Visconti of me? For ages I had worked near him and I knew he trusted and had what is called regard for me. Yet the planets in trackless space knew more of each other. I believe he knows that I am a middle-aged bachelor and I know he has a daughter who is the apple of his eye—and he pays the wage by which I live. But what else did we know? He had lost a deeply loved wife and remained a widower. My heart warmed to him in a sudden sympathy. As though reciprocating, he came bustling to my desk a minute later and bending toward me whispered:

"Do not forget that your time is your own—if your demarches—private business—do not forget!" I thanked him but he waved his pudgy hand in sign of friendly deprecation of formalities.

... com 'e duro calle

Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale,

lamented Dante. Yes, hard is the path, the going up and down other people's stairs, when you depend for your livelihood upon them. But Visconti in his manner endeavored to make his "stairs" those of a friend.

There was no word from Randolph that morning and my heart grew every moment heavier.

I seemed to require no food. I straggled aimlessly during the noon hour through mean streets, from Bleecker Street to Abingdon Square, in a world of listless women and dirty children, a desert, ghostly world, drab and wretched.

Shuttling back and forth, all but inanimate, I passed Minot Blackden's studio, but with sudden horror recoiled from entering. I was driven about like a leaf. I was a shadow in a world of shadows.

Towards four o'clock I rose heavily from my desk, determined to drag myself to police headquarters in search of Sergeant Cullum. I expected nothing from him, but, still, he might utter a word of hope.

At that moment my telephone rang. It was Randolph!

His voice was charged and crackling with excitement and importance.

"Will you meet me at Brentano's, corner Twenty-sixth Street and the Avenue right away?"

"Why," I said piteously—"tell me, in God's name—have you news?—what d'you mean?"

A swirl of hope and apprehension swept me like a wave and left me gasping.

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," was the chuckling reply. "I have news—she's—I know where she is—Come right over!"

And without giving me a chance to say more, the young devil hung up the receiver. I cursed the boy in my heart for being a boy—for his callousness to another's suffering.

Exactly how I reached that corner, I cannot now remember. I did not walk and yet I cannot for the life of me recall what manner of conveyance I used. So much happened in my mind during that transit that external matters left absolutely no impression upon it. The first impression I do recall is the shock of blank chagrin that struck me like a shot in the vitals when I saw Randolph standing jauntily alone at the corner, staring at the passing crowd. Alicia was not with him.

Yet how important the young rascal suddenly seemed in my eyes. He alone in all the world had present knowledge of her. I could have fallen upon him and hugged him then and there—and shamed him to death.

"Where—where is she?" I blurted out. "I thought you—tell me, in heaven's name!" and I seized hold of him fiercely, as though he were a pickpocket caught in the act. He glanced at me with humorous cockiness and laughed. Then suddenly conscious that people were staring at us, and that a policeman was speculatively watching our encounter, he hastily put his arm through mine and drew me away.

"Come on, Uncle Ranny, I'll lead you to where she is."

"You amazing boy!" I muttered. "But are you really sure?"

"Sure I'm sure!" he crowed. "I think it's nothing to be a detective. I believe I'd make a good one," he bragged.

"Brag, you young devil," I thought indulgently, but I made no audible reply and merely made him walk faster.

He was leading me into Twenty-ninth Street beyond Brentano's and to my amazement I found myself at the well-remembered door of Andrews' bookshop.

"Here!" I cried in stupefaction. He nodded, grinning as though he expected an oration of praise for his acumen then and there. He did not get it. I rushed in wildly, like a mad man, into those silent precincts where so often I had passed blissfully silent hours. Who would desire a garish light in this pleasant temple? For a moment I seemed to be in utter darkness.

"Kind of dark," murmured Randolph, "but I spotted her."

On a sudden my dilated eyes encountered two human beings simultaneously in their line of vision. Andrews was standing in dignity in the middle of his shop like a monarch about to receive royalty, and behind him, at a desk in the rear, a girl was bending over some writing, an electric light illumining her fair head.

The girl—yes!—It was Alicia!

I felt the effect of a sharp blow over the heart and, brushing the astonished Andrews aside, I made a crazy leap toward her.

"Why, Mr. Randolph Byrd!" began Andrews. "Haven't seen you—"

"Alicia!" I cried out in what sounded even in my own ears like a sob.

"Oh, Uncle Ranny!" She jumped from her chair with a little scream, and, before I knew it, I was pressing her to my heart with a quivering convulsive joy that choked all utterance.

She gasped in pain, the poor child. But when my arms relaxed, she lay sobbing happily against my heart.

Randolph was so scandalized that he sullenly turned his back upon us. Andrews was watching us with discreet and sober interest.

"My dearest child!" I whispered, still in a sort of trance of ecstasy, and Alicia, with the tears trickling down her face, murmured softly.

"Oh, how glad I am I'm found! And there's Randolph," she added with a happy laugh.

Her last words suddenly woke me out of my trance. I loosed my arms and stood for an instant baffled, uncertain, shamefaced.

"What are you doing here?" I then brusquely demanded with stupid severity to conceal the turbulent emotions within me.

"I—oh, didn't you get my letter?" she faltered. "I tried to explain—I had nowhere to go—" her lips were quivering—"he told me what a burden I was—I seemed to be only making a lot of trouble—and I had nowhere to go," she wept.

"He? Who? Andrews?" I demanded harshly.

"No, no!—Mr. Pendleton," she was sobbing again.

"Ah, of course, Pendleton." I felt myself turning livid with hate for the man whose purpose in life seemed to be to wreck my own.

"And did Andrews know you were my—my ward?"

"Oh, no, Uncle Ranny," and her voice was like a child's tired of crying. "I meant to tell him later—after I told you. He just took me without—anything."

Glancing now toward Andrews, I found him discreetly standing, still in the middle of his shop, but somehow he had managed to draw my scandalized nephew into conversation to afford me the courtesy of a greater privacy. My heart went out to him in affection as never before.

"Andrews!" I called, pulling myself together to a semblance of dignity. Andrews gave a nod to Randolph and without any unseemly haste approached me, pleasantly smiling.

"This is my ward—Miss Alicia Palmer," I managed to say with forced calmness.

Andrews bowed ceremoniously as though he were meeting the owner of the Huth library or Bernard Quaritch. Yet there was a curious twinkle in his shrewd old Scotch eyes.

"Like all young women of the present day," I went on, with astonishing glibness—that is at its best when a man is lying for a woman—"she wanted to prove her independence by scorning my poor protection, Andrews—to earn her own living—you understand, Andrews?"

"Indeed—indeed?" said Andrews. "And she can earn it, too. Now I understand the mystery. She recognized a second edition of 'Paradise Lost' at a glance. Your training, Mr. Byrd—your salary is advanced, Miss Palmer."

Alicia smiled, blushing faintly, and in that smile I suddenly realized how much of the child still clung to this well-grown young woman—how much of the child, no doubt, remains clinging to every woman. She was pained, distraught, suffering, yet she seemed to feel that she had done something very courageous and dignified. And it was to her dignity I hung on with tenacity, for instinctively I recognized that this was a turning point in her life—that the woman was now putting away the child in the cradle of the past.

"I think I shall ask you to release her, Andrews." I laid a hand upon his shoulder. "Some day I shall explain to you more fully. It's been—but never mind that. I should like to take my ward home—with your permission?"

"Certainly, certainly," he affirmed with spontaneous vehemence. "But come in soon, both of you—she's of our stripe, Mr. Byrd—she loves the good things!—come in both. I expect to have some new things from Professor Gurney's library that'll delight you."

"We shall indeed, my dear Andrews. Get your hat, Alicia." And as she turned away for her things, I managed to murmur this much to the kindly Andrews:

"I shall never forget your conduct in this matter, Andrews—you're a great bookseller, but, man dear, you're even a greater gentleman!"

And with as little delay as possible we left the shop.

A spate of questions boiled in my brain and foamed up like turbulent waters backed by a dam. But all at once I came to a sharp decision.

I knew enough. It was that devil Pendleton that had filled her mind with the thought that she was a burden until the poor child was wild with a frenzy of distraction. But he had not been able to trust to his persuasions. Then there was the scene of that dreadful evening when, in her bewilderment, she realized herself as an apple of discord, a shatterer of families. I believed I understood enough.

"Where did you sleep, Alicia?" I asked her nonchalantly.

"I have a little room in Twenty-fourth Street," she answered simply. "I haven't paid for it yet. The landlady wanted money in advance, but I told her I didn't have it, so she let me stay, anyway."

"Let us go there, my dear, and settle it now."

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured low.

"I've got to hand it to you, 'Licia," broke out Randolph, emerging from his silence. "You're a true sport—for a girl!" Whereat we all burst into happy laughter.

And for the rest of our peregrinations as well as in the train, the lad could not take his eyes from Alicia in sheer amazed admiration. It was as though he were seeing her for the first time.

CHAPTER XX

Had I time to speculate philosophically, I could expend much of it in wondering why pure joy cannot be recorded. Perhaps because we experience so little of it.

Of sorrow and tribulation we strange creatures that are men can give a pretty fair account. From Job down we have excelled in it. But before sheer joy we are dumb. I can only repeat to myself the poor colorless words that I am happy, happy, happy as the day is short.

For one brief space of reaction after finding Alicia, the senses reeled, the worn body and mind swooned into a sort of deliquescence of lassitude, the eyes smarted with unshed meaningless moisture, the overdriven heart throbbed with a vast supernal relief, coextensive with the universe. Then, swiftly, with an almost audible sound, that unnerved brain slid into its customary shape of health, more wholesomely joyous than ever before, and all the world was bathed in freshness.

The blue of the sky was fairer, the sunlight purer, and even the poor suburban grass of Crestlands autumnally waning, glistened with the verdure and brightness of a new creation. But who can describe happiness?

Pendleton is gone, Alicia—the children are here.

No eight words in the language of Shakespeare and Milton have ever breathed to me the same meaning as those eight words. Yet what do they signify on paper?

All Europe is in a turmoil, and the Germans have all but taken Paris, yet this, I perceive, is my first mention of a vast catastrophe. What tiny self-absorbed creatures are men! People are dying and suffering by the thousands, yet we cisatlantians scan the headlines and pursue our own ends in the accustomed way. What though half the planet is in peril—I have reconquered my home!

Why, I wonder, had I ever imagined myself to have a horror of home? A home is a little island of personal love in the vast impersonal chaos of existence—and pity him or her who never lands upon that island.

Of nights, occasionally, I now indulge myself in a fire on the hearth. The wood that burns brightest, I note, leaves only a little heap of white ashes. When my eyes rest upon Alicia, or I see the children flitting about, or hear their ringing voices through the house, I experience a wonderful contentment that I am the fire at which they may warm their hands. I, who once entertained fantastic visions of future greatness, of name and fame, now feel content to become a little heap of white ashes.

Sergeant Cullum, excellent man, journeyed out here two days after I had found Alicia, a day after the legal ceremony of adoption, to apprise me that "he believed my ward to be in Baltimore." I was about to burst into uncontrollable laughter, but my conscience smote me and I was ashamed. In my vast relief I had wholly and selfishly forgotten this good man who was still upon the quest. What power of divination or answer to prayer had directed his thoughts to Baltimore, I cannot imagine. But with my contrite apology and thanks went a gift that I trust has soothed his ruffled feelings. We parted in friendship. Oh, excellent thaumaturgic policeman!

Randolph burst into a loud sniffing laugh when I told him and Alicia of Sergeant Cullum's visit and the Baltimore "clew."

"Oh, cops are idiots!" he chuckled arrogantly and looked toward Alicia with a haughty proprietorial air. "They don't know anything! Didn't take me long to dope out where to look for 'Licia," he boasted. "I figured it out like this: 'Licia is bugs on your old books. She was looking for a job to earn her own living, wasn't she?" Alicia bent her head, still shamefaced over the episode. "What'd I do? I'm strong on engines. Wouldn't I go to a place where they make or sell engines? Well, with her it was books. I went around to some book places—'n' then suddenly I had a hunch: Andrews—that you and she always jaw about. I looked him up in the 'phone book. An' sure enough, when I went round and peeped in through the door, I saw Alicia upon a ladder handling some of those old books there. I thought I'd go in and call her down, but then I thought 't would surprise her more if you and I came in on her together—and I beat it hot-foot to a 'phone. Cops!—They'd say, Baltimore—South America—anything, so it sounds good!"

And again his glance wholly appropriated Alicia. The youngster seems to think he invented her. But I am full of gratitude to that boy.

The closure of the Stock Exchange and the abrupt slowing up of financial business has filtered like a shadow even into Visconti's and is giving me some unhurried hours in which to ponder the future.

How many middle-aged bachelors, I wonder, have conjured similar visions, constructed the same castles of thin air? To educate Alicia, to serve and to love her until my love surrounds her so that she cannot choose but return it—to create a woman Pygmalion-like out of this very sweet Galatea—what could be more blissful? Alicia is now in her teens. But suppose she were sweet-and-twenty, could she ever think with anything but filial affection of a man nearly twice her age who stands to her in loco parentis?

Like a lovesick boy who pulls at the faint intimations of his mustache and searches the newspaper for cases of marriage at seventeen, I eagerly scan the prints and cudgel my memory for such unions as ours would be. But the papers are filled with war and rumors of war. It comes to me suddenly that a certain aged Senator has not so long ago married his ward, under even a greater disparity of ages—and I am absurdly happy. I see myself with Alicia matured and radiant, ever young—living a life of bright serenity, calling endearing names.

"Did I hear it half in a doze

Long since, I know not where?

Did I dream it an hour ago,

When asleep in this arm-chair?"

But this is folly. Tennyson is out of fashion and there are greater fools than old fools. I ask too much of the high gods. Enough has already been given to a crusty bookworm like me. Suppose I had married Gertrude! The children's voices would never have made music for my ears. Nevertheless, Alicia shall have the best education I can give her.

Visconti must be aging, I fear, for he has taken to repeating himself. He has told me often before that his daughter Gina is the apple of his eye, but during these somewhat listless days in the office in which "extras" figure largely and strategy is the one indoor game, he has been going into more detail.

I dined at his house last night and to-day he asked me again to dine on Saturday. I dislike refusing him and I like lying less. But I declined on the plea of an engagement.

"I always forget," he returned with a laugh, "that a young man is not un' burbero of a widower like me—that a young man, in short, has engagements."

I made some sort of deprecating noise. He talks as though I were twenty-two, and I like him for it.

"But you see, amico mio," he went on explaining, "it is like this: Gina, the carissima bambina mia, is the apple of my eye. And she must be—what do you call it—amused—amused, made gay, bright—you see?"

I signified my clairvoyance.

"She is nineteen—a fanciulla of nineteen, she must have much—eh—amusement, not so?"

He is fond of the Socratic method and I humored him.

"But doesn't she go to parties—has she no girl friends?"

"Ah, sicurissimo, sicurissimo. But a girl—nineteen years—it is young men in the house that amuse her, eh?" And he slapped me on the back and roared with laughter of a boisterous heartiness that somewhat, as novelists say, "took me aback."

I have not exactly been seeing myself in the guise of a youth cut out to amuse Gina Visconti.

"How of Sunday?" he asked, with a sudden quizzical soberness. "Sunday you can come?"

I regretted his insistence, but somewhat laboredly I explained that I am weakly addicted to books; and that Sunday was the single day when I could sit among my books and—

"Ah, but of course!" gravely. He understood full well that I was a student, a scholar, who outside office hours pursued a higher life, and so forth.

I felt mawkish and mean but I clung to my Sunday.

"Monday, then—shall we call it Monday?" he pressed.

I could not be so churlish as to decline further. But I hardly knew why a sense of uneasiness stole into my bosom after his subsequent words.

"The fanciulla," he went on, thoughtfully vehement. "She is all I possess—all in the world. At my death she shall possess everything I have. She has it now! For whom then do I work if not for Gina? As for me, I could go back to Italy—maybe. I have enough. But Gina—she is American girl—ah!" and he kissed his finger tips with unction. "She is fine American girl!"

Having said that, he veered into talk about Belgium, Von Kluck and general strategy.

But why should he so persistently sing the praises and prospects of his daughter to me, a clerk in his office?

I had a sudden impulse to go to him and unbosom myself on the score of my own bambimi and my own aspirations for them—but somehow I could not. That is an island girdled, not only by ordinary reticence, which is with me a vice, but by a host of emotions like those flames that circled the sleeping goddess. I am not a Latin; I cannot bubble forth my inmost hopes or flaunt my heart upon my sleeve.

Sunday evening—after a wonderful walk with Alicia through the already waning woods of Westchester. There has been a certain air of gravity overhanging her, of contrition perhaps, that stabbed with pain. I realized then to what degree her blithe spirit and the starry laughter of her eyes had been the wine of my recent life. I could not tolerate her seeming depression. Besides, there was the matter of her education to be discussed. Jimmie clamored to go with us, but this time even his privileged position did not avail him. I desired to be alone with Alicia.

Was it my mood, I wonder, or do the woods in reality begin to whisper a farewell in the decline of the year? Every tree, even to the youngest sapling, seemed to nod to us as we walked and to rustle a murmur like the leavetaking of a pilgrim bent on a lengthy journey. I have ever been impatient of reading descriptions of nature and have chimed with the scoffers at the pathetic fallacy. Nevertheless, I can bemuse myself for hours listening to the wind among the tree tops or gazing at the haze upon the hills; and in a slow measured rhythm, as if having endless time before them, they invariably spell a message,—a message infinitely sad, but for the creative laughing sun that rides triumphant, high over all.

"Come, Alicia!" I broke out brusquely, joining the sun in his laughter, "we have some bright things to talk over. Don't let us allow the woods to lull us. They are going to sleep; we are not. Here you are ready for college. Isn't that soul-stirring?"

She emerged from her reverie as a person shaken from a drowse and smiled with, a distant look in her eyes.

"Bright things," she murmured pensively; "everything that has happened to me since I came to you has been bright, and everything soul-stirring. That's what makes it so hard, Uncle Ranny—I have been so useless. What good am I?"

I laughed uproariously enough to make the woods shake. Did Alicia know how much I enjoyed combating such statements or did she really mean it?

"You have been—" I wanted to tell her banteringly that she had been a burden and a drag upon my household, a weight not to be borne—but I perceived that she was more than serious. She was sad.

"Now you are, of course, talking nonsense," I answered flatly. "But there is college before you; that ought to cure all that. Perhaps you're a little morbid. Bright associations will change that."

"But how," she protested, "can you talk of sending me to college—with all the expense? And I so worthless?"

"We won't discuss that, my child," I broke in. The expense had indeed occupied my mind—but I had formed a plan for that. "Tell me what you would like best to study—to be?"

"That's the trouble, Uncle Ranny," she replied pathetically. "What can I be?—Perhaps I might work for Mr. Andrews?"

"Modern girls," I informed her, "judging by our fiction, invariably develop literary, dramatic or histrionic talent. She must act, write fiction, or preferably plays. Journalism and settlement work are no longer fashionable. If the worst comes to the worst, they turn militant suffragists, but even that is on the wane; but the two careers are not incompatible. Don't you feel the urge in your young bones? Which of the arts is it that is calling you? The pen? The stage? Speak, Alicia—for this is the critical hour!"

She detected raillery in my voice and laughed softly.

"I know you are making fun of me, Uncle Ranny," she said, "but it's not of me alone. All the same, I wish I did have some talent, but, oh, I know I haven't! Sometimes—I wish—I think—oh, Uncle Ranny, I am ashamed to tell you what I—" and without finishing her sentence she covered her face with her hands and I noted that her neck was suffused with a deep blush.

"But you must tell me, my dear," I gently took her hands from her face. "Haven't I just become your parent and guardian by ironclad legal adoption? And a terribly stern parent and guardian I am—make no mistake about that!"

"Well," she gazed downward shamefacedly, still exquisitely blushing, "I suppose I must, then. Sometimes I think, Uncle Ranny," she went on with deliberate firmness, "that there is one thing girls always think of, but never talk about—that is more important than any of the others. Oh, I suppose I am terribly improper and immodest, but if I am, it's because—I don't know any better—so you'll have to forgive me. But, oh, I suppose—he'll come some day and—to—to make a home and—and to bring up children seems—more wonderful than anything else! You've made me say it, Uncle Ranny!" she turned away with tears of vexation—"I suppose I am horrid—but you've made me tell you and I told you. Can't a girl study to be—for that—as for anything else?" And still tormented by her brazen immodesty, she plucked yellowing leaves agitatedly and scattered them to the winnowing breeze.

As she was turned from me, she could not have seen my arms going out suddenly as if to take her, and then falling again to my sides. I longed to embrace her and to crown her with all the glory of womanhood. But my conscience warned me away. In my heart, however, happiness leaped up like the lark I have never seen and warbled joyously a divine melody that I had never heard. It required courage for Alicia, a young girl, to confess what she had confessed. And courage joined to all the other qualities I knew her possessed of must produce the best that is in womanhood.

It is a commentary on our times that Alicia, a girl ready for college, was ashamed of what she had told me!

I was a fool to press her further, I suppose, but then and there I determined to be at least as brave as was Alicia.

"Have you," I asked, hoping my voice was not shaking, "have you already some one in mind?" She shook her head vehemently, still plucking at the leaves, I could not repress a profound sigh. "What does he look like in your mind's eye, Alicia? What is your vision of him?" I knew I was courting pain, but there are moments when even torture is irresistible.

"I hope he will be strong—and fine—and manly," she murmured as if to herself—"and have at least some of your—goodness, Uncle Ranny." Every attribute of that hypothetical "he" was a reproach to my infirmities—a blow at my peculiar weaknesses. But I had invited it. The ideal of a girl never errs. It is her emotions that may lead her astray. Oh, yes—she credited me with some "goodness." Few are the women, however, who choose a man for his goodness. In my quality of "Uncle Ranny" I was "good." I stood for a moment in silence, writhing with anguish, alternately conjuring up and banishing the hatefully magnificent creature of Alicia's dreams. But at last I gripped my soul with sudden resolution. Now at least she was mine; and I must accustom myself to the idea of her being some one else's at the earliest moment—to the inevitable renunciation. She had innocently and adorably honored me with her greatest confidence: For the present, at least, I must make the most of my little happiness.

"Come, dear," I gently touched her on the shoulder. "You have told me what I wanted to know." I put her hand through my arm and we strolled on slowly. "We are horrible old fogies, Alicia, and we mustn't tell a soul about our views—or we should be ostracized and possibly jailed. But nothing you could have said would have made me happier than what you have just told me. I know of no greater career than the one you have chosen. And college, much or little as you like of it, can serve you for a finer womanhood no less than it can for anything else. In fact, more, I think." From still swimming eyes she gave me a sidelong glance mingled so much of gratitude, shame and pride, that I laughed aloud.

"There is one thing you've got to make up your mind to, Alicia." I drew her close to my side. "You must come and tell me everything that's on your mind without repression. Don't forget, my dear, that I am your father, mother and most intimate friends. Think how sorry we should both have been if you had suppressed and hidden what you have told me."

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she breathed and very sweetly in a way to melt the heart of a man, she lifted my hand to her lips and kissed it. I was irreparably "Uncle Ranny!"

I dared not make a movement in return. At that moment I might have betrayed more than ever again I could hide. But the woods were now of another hue; the invisible lark was still singing, albeit a sadder strain.

We decided that Alicia is to enter Barnard next week and commute with me on the daily train.

CHAPTER XXI

Dear God! How I cry out for peace, and there is no peace!

Who would have looked for disaster at the plump hands of Gina Visconti? Yet, as though she had willfully shut the door of my livelihood in my face, that innocent girl has abruptly cut me off.

I cannot go back to Visconti's. That accursed dinner, which instinct made me shun, was the cause and occasion of it all.

I had begun foolishly to feel myself at home in the Visconti household. When the housemaid informed me that the signorina would be down directly, I strolled into the drawing-room leisurely, not in the least surprised that I was apparently the only guest, and gazed again at the shining new furniture, costly and glistening, for the nth time wondering how it continued to stay so new. There is a scattering of saccharine pictures on the walls that invariably make me smile: Cherry Ripe, the Old Oaken Bucket, Sweet Sixteen; a glittering small marble of Cupid and Psyche and a crayon enlargement of the very stout lady that was Gina's mother. Why, I wondered, do not modern Italians stick to their own old masters? I once bought a very fair copy of Pope Julian II in Florence for fifty lire. Even Gina's energetic modernism, however, seemed unable to exorcise the peculiar airless odor of an Italian's drawing-room, due largely, I suppose, to hermetically sealed windows and constantly lowered shades.

Gina came down directly, as had been promised, in a very pretty satin evening frock that struck me as too light for a girl as full-bodied as she. That is a detail, however, which was superseded in my mind by the query as to why she should feel it necessary to romp into a room rather than walk. But I know she aspires to be hyper-American. Her greeting is always warm and her energy was the one touch of ozone in that stuffy drawing-room. A moment later entered her father, his dark-red face pardonably gleaming like a moon through the haze at the charms of his only daughter. For Gina is not only pretty—she is eminently modish, to the last wave of her rich black hair.

"Is she a fine American girl—or is she not, eh?" Visconti's half-proud, half-defiant look seems to challenge all present.

The dinner was more than usually exuberant with a wealth of champagne for so small a company and hothouse grapes; indeed the exuberance itself seemed of the hothouse variety. We jested, we laughed at nothing, we were gay as old friends at a reunion. At the Visconti's I am always foolishly like that Byron-worshiping lady who could not long abstain from referring to Missolonghi. Somehow I find myself caressingly touching the subjects of Dante or Petrarch or even Leopardi, and invariably Gina caroms against me with a thrilling cabaret, a new dance or the latest "show"—and I am nowhere.

After the coffee Visconti, whose mind seemed preoccupied, rose abruptly and with one of his gleaming smiles left us on the hackneyed plea of letters to be written.

Gina was restless for a minute or two after her father's departure. She walked over to the piano, struck a chord standing, then suddenly sheered to the phonograph and asked would I dance if she turned on a lovely fox trot. Apologetically I was compelled to inform her that the fox trot was as foreign to my accomplishments as an act on the trapeze.

"I know you could learn to be a lovely dancer," said Gina, She then sat down beside me on the expensive tapestry davenport, with one foot under her and one ankle to the wide world and leaned forward on her elbows so that the slender shoulder straps of her frock pressed upward four little mounds of pink flesh toward her ears. She has very pretty ears, has Gina. A very engaging child, I thought. Holding this soulful attitude, Gina queried softly,

"Don't you love the movies?"

"Yes," I said.

"What have you seen lately?" she pursued.

"I have only seen one—it was a series of pictures of the South Sea Islands."

"You mean you've never seen any others?"

"No—I'm afraid not."

"Oh," she gasped, "I've loved the movies since I was that high"—and she pointed to a somewhat excessively oily portrait of herself painted at about the age of ten or eleven.

"I believe in having a lively time," she ran on. "When I was in public school some of them called me the 'little guinea girl.' I cried terribly—but I made up my mind I wasn't going to be a 'guinea girl.' I was going to be an American. Wasn't I as good as any of them?" she demanded passionately. "What was the matter with me? Then I found out what was the matter with me—American girls are always having good times. So I thought I'd have as good a time as anybody.

"I cried until my father let me go to the movies nearly every afternoon and twice on Saturday. And I always treated some other girl—an American girl—to a ticket to go with me. They were friendly then, you can bet. They stopped calling me a guinea girl."

Gina could not possibly know how pathetic that sounded to me. The curious savagery of children toward those alien of race, I reflected, is one of the last survivals of the tribal state of mankind. The somewhat overpowering scent she used struck me as a survival also, though I could not remember of what.

"There is my cousin, Jennie—her name is really Gemma"—the girl warmed to her story—"she tried to be American, too, but she gave it up. When I went to finishing school in Darien, she was already married. Four years she's been married and has three children. Now what's the use of that? She can't have a good time now! Babies—babies—babies!—she hardly ever goes out. And her husband's quite well off, too. He's a contractor. But he's an Italian—and thinks that's the right way for a girl to live. Uh-h!" and she shuddered slightly. "I'm going to marry an American!"

A fierce light of resolution leaped to her liquid dark eyes and I own I felt terrified.

"But—but aren't you young to think of marriage?" I murmured lamely.

"Young!" repeated Gina in surprise. "I've been thinking about the kind of man I'm going to marry since I was thirteen years old!"

Obviously that was one subject she had given mature reflection.

"Haven't you?" she demanded.

"No," I laughed, "not as young as that."

"Do you like Italian girls?" she leaned toward me abruptly, wistfully.

"Yes, indeed!" I answered her, laughing. "There is Dante's Beatrice—and Petrarch's Laura—and even Raphael's Fornarina must have been—"

"Oh, I don't mean those," she cried, flushing excitedly. "I mean Italian-American girls—I love American men! The man I'm going to marry is—something like you."

I like simplicity, and disingenuousness in the young—or in the old, for that matter—but her attitude was now so—so unconventional, with her large ankle rocking to and fro and her bosom, as she leaned forward, almost touching my shirt front—that I feared her father might be displeased were he to enter the room suddenly. The scent, moreover, was clouding my wits. With my hand to my forehead I rose ponderously.

"Let me see—" I mused with heavy facetiousness, as though cogitating a deep problem, "do I like them?" I walked a step or two and faced her. "You are the only one I know—and I certainly like you," I added mildly.

She uncoiled herself, rose up swiftly and took a step in my direction. On a sudden she stumbled, gave a little cry and pitched forward, so that I barely had time to catch her.

"Did you turn your ankle?"

"No—yes," she gasped and lay for a moment in my arms breathing heavily, her bosom pressing against mine.

"Let me lead you—" I began.

"It's all right," she whispered thickly. "Just let me rest a minute." And then that astonishing girl suddenly lifted up her hand, passed it lightly over my head and murmured that she loved the color of my hair!

"It's light brown," she explained, "not pitch black like mine," and then she rested her head lightly on my shoulder. "And I love your name—it's so nice—Randolph!"

"Let me lead you," I murmured, as though I were the helpless one.

"Ecco!" I suddenly heard the voice of Visconti laughing behind me, and Gina's hand clutched my shoulder convulsively. I confess that at my heart was a clutch of sheer blue funk.

"She has just turned her ankle!" I exclaimed mechanically.

"It's all right, papa," put in Gina's cheerful voice. "It's these old slippers. I'll go and change them." And to my amazement she straightened up, flashed a radiant smile at both of us, and walked to the door with only the slightest of limps.

"Sure you can walk alone?" I managed to stammer.

"Oh, yes!" Gina waved her hand at the door. "I'll be down soon."

The father laughed loudly and put his hand upon my shoulder.

"Come, caro mio, let us have a little smoke." I followed him dazedly. "Wonderful girl, Gina!" he exclaimed. "High spirits, eh?"

"Er—yes, indeed—very high." I felt as though I had emerged from a severe physical struggle.

"I can see—oh, even an old man like me can see," he chuckled jovially, as he held his cigar box toward me in the smoking room, "that you young people like each other—eh? Oh, sit down, sit down, amico mio. It is all right—all right. I must get used to the idea of the bambino, being grown up," and forcing me down into a leather chair, he continued to tap my shoulder by way of emphasizing his words. "I have been young—yes! I understand—and trust me, my boy, you cannot do better. Gina—Gina is one treasure for a man. Ah—yes! No love like the Italian woman's love. She will make you the best—"

"But wait—for God's sake, Mr. Visconti, wait," I cried in agony, leaping from my chair. "I can't—I mustn't even pretend to think of such a thing. Gina is far too—"

"Say no more!" he interrupted vehemently, tapping me with the back of his hand on the chest. "You are a fine, gooda young man!"

"Thanks!" I gasped, "but you don't understand. I am in no position to marry any woman at this time. I'm—"

"Hold on!" he flung me back into the chair with an exuberant force that would have made me laugh if my vitals had not been chilled by terror. "Is it that I do not know? Do I not know how your capital did go—pouf! like that? But all that I have—Gina has it. She will have enough," and he nodded his head with pregnant emphasis, "enough, my friend. And Gina's husband—he will be my son!" He struck his large chest a mighty blow and threw back his head with triumphant finality.

I attempted no more to rise. It was useless.

"Signor Visconti," I began huskily, "you do not understand me. I cannot marry anybody, ever. I have four children to bring up—educate—to be responsible for. The youngest of them is eight. I—you honor me greatly by your kindness—but marriage is not for me."

He stared in speechless stupefaction at me as though I had revealed some incredible horror to his eyes.

"Four children!" he whispered, with dilated eyes. "But who—but I thought you have never been married?"

"I have not," I replied with an intense relief that was like a restorative. Then, catching his meaning glance, I went on hastily; "They are my sister's orphans. I am responsible for them. They have no one else."

"Ah!" he drew in his breath with the sound of a syphon. "That is it, is it?"

"Yes," I murmured, rising, resolved to put an end to this ghastly episode. "Now, if you will excuse me—"

All at once his hands shot out and clutched both of mine.

"You're not good man!" he shouted vehemently. "No—not only good—you're a great man! Caro mio—ah, I never make mistake—no!" And before I knew what he was doing, he had embraced me in Continental fashion and large tears stood in his eyes.

The cup of my torment was complete. A mad desire to get away possessed me—only to get away. I stirred to move but he held me resolutely.

"We will think it out, my friend," he announced with sober energy. "We will talk it over—work it out. I, too, am a man with a heart, caro mio. It is I who understand—Have I not lost my poor Giovanna—Gina's mother? If you two love each other—well—we must find—a way."

Hope bounded in my pulses as I noted that his enthusiasm was now tempered by thoughtfulness.

"No, Mr. Visconti," I murmured with painful firmness. "I have no right to love Miss Gina—and I wouldn't dream of telling her so, even if I did—I am not free—"

"You—you're not promesso—what d'you call it—engaged?"

"Oh, no, no! It is only my heart that is engaged—not my word—there is some one else—but it can never be anything—"

"But what does it mean?" he flashed, dark anger purpling his features and kindling the air like a torch. "What did I see! My girl in your arms—what was that!" His eyes now darted fiery anger and his arms were arrested in the midst of a violent gesture.

I shook my head slowly. His anger was infinitely more agreeable to me—like manna—after his parching enthusiasm.

"There was nothing," I answered quietly. "Miss Gina really turned her ankle on the rug. And I caught her as she fell—just as you would have done."

He stood panting for a moment, his gaze riveted upon me. At last he turned away, with a pitiful movement of regret, apology, resignation. The excellent man gave me the benefit of the doubt.

"Ah, Dio mio," he muttered. "Poverina! Go, my friend, now. I must think. Bellessa mia!—cara mia!—what will I say to her? Ah, Dio! what a bitter world!"

"I am more distressed than I can say," I murmured, with the crushed voice of poignant suffering, "but what can I do—or say—more?"

"Niente—nothing, nothing," he muttered. "Good night!" and my admiration for his spirit was high when he held out his trembling hand.

I tiptoed to the door like a thief and as I took my coat and hat, Gina called out from the top of the stairs in uncomprehending astonishment.

"Not going—Randolph!" And like a small avalanche she shot down the stairs.

"Yes—yes—he is going, bellessa mia!" firmly shouted Visconti as he came running towards us. "He is called away—good night—good night!"

"Good night," I said and held out my hand to Gina. But Gina's manners are more modern than her father's. She was dumbfounded and she turned her back upon me angrily, registering doubtless some standard emotion from a favorite movie. It was useless to try to placate her. I slipped out of the door which will never more open for me.

The nightmarish quality of the episode persisted in my consciousness like a drug throughout the passage homeward, and it was not until I entered my door and saw a light in my study that reality began to assert itself.

Reality meant the end—the end of my livelihood, the end of my hopes and plans—the end of the tether. Like an unfledged boy I must begin to breast the future all over again. A hero of romance would doubtless at that moment have thrilled to the struggle with new and seemingly insuperable obstacles. But alas! I am not a hero of romance! As I threw my coat upon the hatstand, a great weariness and a deep dejection fell upon me.

Alicia came out of my study to greet me. As usual she had been waiting up for me.

"Why on earth aren't you in bed?" I growled irritably. Alicia scanned my face amid the shadows cast by the lamplight. "Go to bed, child," I repeated; "go to bed."

"Something has happened," she murmured, frightened; "something has happened. Oh, tell me—what was it, Uncle Ranny?"

I looked down at her with a scowl that was meant to be forbidding—a warning that I was in no mood for triflingness.

She seized my hand, still holding my gaze with that starry look in her eyes that invariably probes deep and rests in my inmost soul.

"Something has hurt you, Uncle Ranny," she whispered tremulously, "and you must tell me." Our eyes dwelt together for a space. "Oh, tell me!" she gulped, with a sudden terror dilating her eyes. "It isn't—it isn't that—man come back!"

"Oh, no!" I shuddered involuntarily at the image she evoked of Pendleton. "Not that. Thank Heaven, Alicia, you're no Pollyanna; you see the worst at once."

"No," I finally muttered, looking away, "I have hurt somebody."

"I can't believe that," she retorted vehemently. "But if you think so—Please, please, tell me. It will be so much better, for you, Uncle Ranny."

I had a sudden impulse to take her in my arms, but the emotion was not paternal. And—I was to her "Uncle Ranny." All unconscious she was guarded by her circle of sacred flames. Spasmodically I tore my hand out of her grasp and walked unsteadily across the room to my table.

"Sit down over there," I motioned her as far away from me as possible. She stood still without complying.

"What was it, Uncle Ranny, dear?" she breathed.

A sort of bittersweet pain went through me at the epithet and I reviled myself inwardly for the impurity of my dark mind in the presence of this simple, lovely purity. A profound sigh escaped me as I leaned my elbows on the table and made a feeble effort to smile at the mocking visage of Fate.

"I cannot go back to Visconti's any more, Alicia," I told her. "Something has happened. That is ended. I must look about for something else."

"Oh!" she gasped, "is it as bad as that?"

"As bad as that," I repeated mechanically.

"Then I know it was nothing you could help," she answered with a sudden radiance that was like a benediction.

"So there is no use worrying about that. But you mean the money," and her face clouded anxiously. "But I know what I'll do, Uncle Ranny," she came gliding toward me. "There is always Mr. Andrews for me, you know. You remember what he said: He'll take me back any time."

An instant of blackness was succeeded by a sudden burst of illumination. Andrews! Andrews and the library—the library, all catalogued—complete! Andrews would either buy it or help me to dispose of it, and Alicia and the children need not after all suffer by my catastrophe. My books were more like my flesh and blood, and to part with them—-but that consideration was of singularly brief endurance at the moment. Those books, like a troop of old friends; would rescue us all from disaster—come like a phalanx between us and defeat.

"You amazing child!" I cried, leaping to my feet. "Light!—You've brought me light! Andrews!—The very man! To-morrow I am going to Andrews!"

I seized her by the shoulders and whirled her about the room like a marionette in a savage burst of energy. Alicia gasped and, spinning away, laughed wildly with a laughter that bordered upon sobs. I dread to reflect what our neighbors would have concluded, had they observed through the windows the strange Dionysian rite of the quiet middle-aged bachelor and his youthful pretty ward.

"Now go to bed, child," I commanded brusquely. "I have some thinking to do."

"Shall I make you some coffee?" she pleaded, coming toward me, still laughing.

"No—go to bed!" Before I was aware she had left a darting birdlike kiss upon my cheek and fled like a breeze from the room.

My eyes dwelt upon the door for a space where she had vanished, and then they turned involuntarily to the serried peaceful rows of books that had been my life,—that now, in the last extremity of need, must, like the camel in the desert, yield up their blood to be my livelihood.

The following morning, that is to-day, I made my way to Andrews, armed with my catalogue, and greatly to that good fellow's astonishment offered him the sale of my library.

He stared at me in blank amazement for an instant and then, recovering himself, declared that he would like to see it.

"Come back to lunch with me," I suggested.

He could not do that, but agreed to come to dinner in the evening.

His shrewd old eyes took in much more than the details of my copies and editions during his two or three hours at my house. With discreet but observant gaze he followed the children about and measured, more accurately no doubt than I could have done, the worth and solidity of my household. He had seen something of my easy bachelor life in the old days and, doubtless, was now drawing his contrasts and conclusions.

"What do you think you can offer?" I queried with some anxiety, as he stood carefully fingering the books which, like Milton's one talent, it were death to hide—for they were bread.

Andrews sat down and stared for an interval thoughtfully before him.

"I'll tell you what I'd like to offer you before we talk about the books—" he spoke with an even, a studied deliberation. "I'd like to offer you—a partnership!"

It was my turn to stare in stupefaction.

"It would be a great thing for me if you came in with me, Mr. Byrd," he now spoke more quickly. "You see, I'm an old man, getting on, sir—getting on. I want some new blood in the place—new blood—a fresh point of view and young enthusiasm. That young lady of yours coming in the way she did woke me up to that. And whom could I leave it to when it comes to the end?" he speculated wistfully. "I have no relations."

I opened my mouth to speak, but Andrews took the privilege of age to disregard me.

"I want a man with the tender touch for books, Mr. Byrd—the tender touch. It's a beautiful business," he smacked his lips—"beautiful! The hunting for them—it's—it's a knightly quest. And to find homes for them—it's like placing bonny children. The bookmen of America are generous. We ought to go to England—buy libraries—increase our treasure."

"But, my dear Andrews," I spluttered, in agitated protest. "Do you know what you are offering me? A career, a livelihood, life itself—the future of those children of mine—what can I contribute, except these books—and compared to your business and good will!—"

"If you were rich," he interrupted, "do you suppose I'd have the effrontery to make you the offer? You see, I've known you a long time, Mr. Byrd—and it's been a great pleasure to me. If I had a son—but," and his voice struck a harsher note with things repressed—"it's no use going into that. That is the business for a man like you.

"We all need money," he pursued with new energy. "It's a thing to despise if you can—a thing for sentimentalists to drivel about. But so long as our present social and economic system continues, only a fool would decry money. It's no good to you when your heart is breaking, but neither is food nor water, nor shelter nor leisure. But when you want food and shelter and leisure, that is as long as you're above ground, you want money. I have prospered—done well. Will you come with me, Randolph Byrd?"

"My dear good Andrews," I paced the room agitated, exultant, terrified by this stroke of good fortune. "But how can I take advantage of your unheard-of generosity? What can I offer? Will you take my books as a contribution to capital?"

"No," he shook his head, with twinkling eyes and a queer crinkling of the crow's-feet about them. "I don't think we need them. Books are always—books," he concluded oracularly, with a ring in his voice of the true bibliophile's reverence.

"Say you will come."

My heart was suddenly flooded by a rich inundation of hope. This was permanence that Andrews was holding out—this was an anchorage. It was neither Salmon and Byrd, nor Visconti's. This was my own peculiar realm, and only a snob or a fool could reject it. Ça me connait. All the turmoil and troubles of the past seemed to be melting rapidly away like the shapes in dreams or unsubstantial clouds. My life would be secure, the children nourished and educated. Alicia should have her chance unchallenged—should be prepared against the advent of that dream-hero of hers,—when he comes—when he comes! What else was I now living for? I felt as might have felt the old woman of the nursery rhyme, who lived in a shoe, had any one suddenly offered her a vine-clad well-stocked cottage of many chambers, with a future reasonably safe for her progeny. I saw on a sudden the clamorous city that had more than once droned forth my doom, now rich in prospects and gayly reciting the flattering tale of hope in my ears—the hope of becoming a bookseller in face of my dreams of scholarship, eminence—fame, possibly! But this was no dream. With a flitting smile I recognized the wayward cynicism and irony of it. And in deep gratitude I gripped the hand of Andrews to seal the bargain.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER XXII

In returning to this all but neglected record of the things that made up my life I realize with incredulity the passage of time. I realize, too, that when you live the most fully, you write, reflect and record the least. It was after his years of slavery that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote and inside a prison house that Bunyan and Sir Walter Raleigh composed their best-known works.

I shall never compose "works", I am certain now, for my lot is business to the end. Three times during the past two years I have been in England and in France, attending sales, buying books, manuscripts and libraries, and very narrowly I escaped sailing on the Lusitania, which would probably have been the end of these memoirs and of me. Would it have mattered? To the children, possibly. Not to me, certainly—except in so far as they would have suffered by my exit. For though the business of books is to me the one nearest akin to pleasure, it is nevertheless a chaffering and a haggling in the market-place—the reverse of all my tastes and aptitudes.

It is odd that externally I bear few of the marks of the indolent lotus-eating soul that possesses me. People viewing me superficially might think, with Andrews, that I am fitted for stratagems, spoils and—business.

Yet how happy I was when Andrews made me his offer! How I plunged into his affairs—our affairs—and gave them all my energy! The children, I exulted inwardly, the children are now safe!

But nature abhors anomalies. To work for children alone is not enough. One desires to work for a bosom companion, for some beloved woman, whose breast is home, whose warm arms are the one refuge against the world, whose eyes are the bright gateways to heaven. That fulfillment I never had and never shall have. Hence the anomalous sense of frustration, of incompleteness. Some psychoanalyst would doubtless brand this as a well-known middle-aged complex, call it by name like a familiar and proceed to "cure" me of it. But I am not going to any psychoanalyst. I know my trouble and also its name—-though I cannot call it after King OEdipus or King David or the like.

Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse mourned the flame-like Francesca da Rimini. And the name and the author of my trouble is not Galeotto but—Alicia—Alicia whom I did not take and now can never have.

I am no romantic Paolo to Alicia's Francesca. I am a business man—yes, a middle-aged, almost alert New York business man of the approved hard-varnish variety—with good, pat stereotyped phrases and a show of manly sincerity. Who does not know that straight talk of most of us modern business men, under which we can hide so much cunning, shrewdness and chicane? Could I not have simply taken possession of Alicia by a sort of eminent domain? Oh, I don't mean anything improper! I mean by all the astute and usual methods, the bell—book—candle and orange-blossoms sort of thing, like the hardheaded Mr. Pettigrew of American novels, or the wicked marquess or baronet of the English.

But I could not—I could not.

Under the carapace of the turtle or the armadillo is a body of flesh with nerves and blood and viscera—a soft living part. So also under the shell of the maligned business man.

An infinite pity and tenderness stir me at the thought of Alicia. I suddenly feel in my inmost soul the softness of her cheek and it touches me as the delicacy of one's own child's flesh must touch one. If I had a child of my own—but on that I must not let my mind dwell even in dreams.

Yet, why not? Dreams are all I am going to have and, pardie, it is more than I deserve. Much, very much has been given to me and I ought to feel profoundly grateful. And I do feel grateful.

But—Alicia—is engaged.

I can hardly write the words, though these are the words that have driven me to writing again.

I have been happy these two years and more—happy in my fashion. In midst of the tumult and throb of the war spirit I, in common with other business men, have been buying and selling and chaffering and huckstering, rearing Laura's children, educating Alicia and prospering. If newly rich labor has been buying motor cars, it must be admitted that some abruptly enriched business men and their wives have had time to turn from furs and bric-a-brac and interior decorating so far afield as my own remote specialty. They have been buying books—libraries by the yard, classics and first editions by the hundred. The fact that that admirable American book-man, the young Widener, had managed to gather a magnificent collection during his all too brief life, has stimulated many to emulation. Shelley need no longer weep for Adonais. I have sold collections of Keats en bloc to gentlemen who have probably never read Endymion in their lives, and even now I am holding a set of Shelley first editions only because I could not bring myself to part with them to the very crude, almost illiterate, customer who proves to be the highest bidder. Rather would I sell them for less to a more enlightened bookman. Oh, yes, I have been happy in my fashion. Yet, glancing over the few brief scattering entries in this record, why does the tinge of melancholy persist?

I find a quotation from Anatole France under date of some twenty-six months ago to the point that "even the most desired changes have their sadness, for all that we leave behind is a part of ourselves. One must die to one sort of life in order to enter another."

What is it that I regret or regretted—unless it is the mere passage of time that makes me older and older? And again I find:

"Life is a game best played by children and by those who retain the hearts of children. To those who have the misfortune to grow up it is often a nightmare." There it is again—the persistent note of regret. Time will take them all from me—all, including Alicia. And then?—How did I ever come to let passion steal into my heart?

I find some phrases from Hazlitt to the effect that "we take a dislike to our favorite books after a time," and that "If mankind had wished for what is right they might have had it long ago," and then later, a sort of credo, or confession or apologia pro vita mea:

"This is a commercial age. If business is the path of least resistance to a livelihood, so that a slenderly endowed creature like myself may cling to the surface of the planet and pass on what has been accomplished to the generations that must accomplish more—if that is the easiest way, then that is the way of nature, my way. All business may be more or less ignoble. But, if so, who in the present state of evolution can wholly escape the ignoble?"

Yet I have not altered in essentials. Who shall say how I thrill at the sight of beauty, or the rare work of a master? I cannot declare how my pulses throb when a new author swims into my ken—his new voice, his fresh note catch at my throat like a haunting melody and I have known my eyes to fill at the sheer joy of the discovery.

Oh, you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, when you come with your white hair and purblind eyes to scan these notes, will you receive them at their face value? Will you believe that the sense of frustration underlying them has to do with careers and fame and lives of Brunetto Latini? No, my septuagenarian self—I have a respect for you and a warm pity. I cannot so coldly gull you—take advantage of you! Damn careers and business and Brunetto Latinis! I want love, passionate love and children of my own loins and the beloved on my heart, and just the common run of happiness that a thousand thousand men are at this moment enjoying. Then why have I not taken it? Why have I not taken Alicia as King David took Bathsheba, or whatever the lady's name was, in virtue of sheer desire and power? Because I have been a finicking, hyper-refined, hyper-sensitive fool, my aged friend; and now that she is engaged to be married I should be—but now it's too late! Always, always, Randolph Byrd, you have been too late!

All the world can give me advice and analyze me, yet nobody really knows me. Dibdin, who knows me best of all, in reality knows me least. He summed me up, or thought he did, before his periodical departure for parts unknown, some twenty months ago.

"You see," he said, "you've really got a genius for kids. I told you how I felt about Laura. Yet what do I do? I go off to the devil knows where, because I am a tramp. That is stronger in me than anything else. But you, you see, gave up everything else for them—everything. Who but a fool could blink the meaning of that?"

Who but a fool, my dear old Dibdin, could be so blind as you? Who but a fool could fail to see that I am consumed with passion for Alicia and had only been waiting, dreading, hoping until she might be old enough to know her own mind and heart—and waiting too long?

And now Alicia is engaged—and to my own nephew, Randolph—and life for me, life in the rich, vivid, colorful, romantic sense of the word, is at an end.

My nephew Randolph—a sophomore at Columbia—engaged to Alicia!

Flashes of savagery strike into my heart when I could find it possible to hate that youth—notably when I catch the Pendleton expression in his face, the Pendleton shiftiness in his eyes. At such moments I experience an intense, all but irresistible desire to grapple with him as on a certain occasion I grappled with his father, to knock his head against the wall and choke that brazen-faced, insolent temerity out of him with his last breath.

But I am only Uncle Ranny—and I don't suppose I shall do anything of the kind. Have I not brought him up? Have I not labored and toiled for him, watched over him? Is he not my child like the rest? There is something about the person, the very flesh of the child one has reared that disarms one's anger and turns the heart to water. His bad manners hurt more deeply, yet they are not like the bad manners of a stranger. His transgressions are not like others' transgressions. In God's name, your soul cries out, there must be redeeming features, extenuating conditions! Have I not had a hand in shaping him? And was he not ineffably endearing as a child? He may be somewhat wild now, but is not all youth like that on its path to manhood?

This is a parent's point of view, I see, not a rival's. Why, why did that boy, of all the males in the world, take Alicia from me?

It was only yesterday that it happened, but already it seems like an ancient calamity that stamps its victim with the slow grind of years of pain, blanches his flesh and presses him down into the limbo of those undergoing the slow drawn-out tortures of life.

Yet I was happy yesterday. I came home at one, as I do of Saturdays, and the early April sunshine, while still treacherous, was nevertheless full of dazzling promise of spring, of relief from the dread winter we have endured. My head had been buzzing with schemes like a hive. The lease of the châlet expires in May and I was full of vain notions of taking a larger, more attractive house that should be a suitable setting for Alicia. Only one year more of college is left for Alicia after this and then—and then—Alicia had talked of entering the shop, and I should have her with me all the time. How I longed and looked forward to that day! Alicia my constant companion, sharing every moment of the day, going and coming together, lunching together, discussing everything. Who shall blame me if I saw visions?

And then, perhaps an hour after lunch, they suddenly entered my study together—Randolph a half-pace or so behind her with something hangdog in his look—an expression I detest in him—and Alicia, head high, flushed with a look of desperate resolution about the somewhat haggard eyes that startled me.

I had been occupied in turning over the pages and collating a Caxton, a genuine Caxton that I meant later to show to Alicia—"The Royal Book," (1480, 2d year of the Regne of King Rychard the thyrd)—a beautiful incunabulum.

Randolph moved abruptly forward with a jerk of the head, and, his eyes failing to meet mine, he blurted out huskily:

"We're engaged, Uncle Ran—'Licia and I!"

"What!" I yelled harshly as one in pain and fell against the back of my chair. "What—what on earth do you mean!"

But he merely looked away, making no response.

"Is this true, Alicia?" I shouted, as if to overtop the tumult in my breast.

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," breathed Alicia, her eyes gazing into mine with a look so poignantly sad and charged with pain that it froze me as I was about to speak. I sat for a space, my mouth open, our eyes dwelling together for an instant. And then, as by a sudden effort, Alicia smiled valiantly, laid her hand stoutly on the shrinking boy's arm, and then abruptly she lowered her gaze.

"But—but why—why now?" I spluttered. "You are both so young—you only a sophomore, Randolph—and you, Alicia—in God's name, why now?"

Alicia glanced at Randolph as though depending on him to speak and then contemptuously giving it up as hopeless, she straightened her shoulders bravely and murmured in low distinct tones:

"I promised Randolph. He wants me to be engaged to him and I promised him I would."

"You—you mean you—you love each other?" I stammered miserably, for every word was a knife thrust into my own heart.

The lad Randolph was now shamed into a little manliness.

"Yes, we do, Uncle Ranny," came forth in his throaty voice. "That's just it—we—we love each other. And—'Licia has promised to be engaged to me 'til I am through college and get a job."

"I suppose it had to come, Uncle Ranny," explained Alicia with what seemed to me a very labored serenity. "We grew up together. We have been such chums and—and Randolph seemed to—to need me. Don't you see, Uncle Ranny?" There was a piteous note of appeal in her voice which only seemed to lacerate me the more. But I could not speak.

The sunshine had gone out of the April afternoon. Waves of darkness seemed to be beating over me, and the strength and energy of a few minutes back had oozed out of me like so much water. So weak and shattered did I feel that on a sudden I was seized by a panic fear of collapse.

"Please leave me now," my lips, strange cold dead things that seemed in no way a part of my body, brought forth mechanically, yet with heavy effort. "It's—it's a shock—we'll discuss it later." I do not envy those two the sight of my face at that moment. I am pretty certain Randolph did not see it, for he turned away, but I am in doubt about Alicia. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she came toward me with a sudden curious movement of the hands, as though she felt rather than saw her way. Then abruptly her hands dropped to her side and she paused and turned back sharply.

They left me then, both of them. I remained alone—crushed, stunned, alone.

And suffering agony though I am, there is now in me a strange new sense of familiarity with suffering. Anguish and heartache, thank God, are no longer novelties. That much anodyne the sheer business of living does bring to one. I am as sensitive to them as ever I was in my prehistoric days of ease and leisure and reclusion, but they are old acquaintances now. I must go on, hiding my dolor as best I can, working for the sunny comely lad, Jimmie, so brilliant with promise, for the grave sweet-faced Laura, replica of her mother, and—yes—for Randolph and Alicia. I cannot rant and I must not betray any grief or make a spectacle of myself before them. I must carry on.

"Small as might be your lamp," observes the sage of Belgium, "never part with the oil that feeds it, but only give the flame that crowns it."

A poor and tenuous oil is that of my peculiar lamp, a petty flame and a murky result. But such as they are, I must guard them.

I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and the boy. With a leaden heart I must record it that he has proven a disappointment to me. His mediocrity as a student concerns me less than his general tendency to shiftiness, his unsteady eye and his heavy drooping nether lip when he tells me that he "spent the night with the fellows at the frat house", that "a fellow's got to associate with friends of his own age", that "he's got to make friends", and so on. He is through his allowance four days after receiving it and repeatedly begs for more. More than once I have caught the odor of alcohol about him as he came in late at night, and only the fact that he is Laura's boy and that I have reared him has made me condone his many offenses.

Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton?

But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women—how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman's arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy's character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That blind force that is said to move the stars—why can it be so haggard, gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in Werther that bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed inwardly—I must suffer and endure.

CHAPTER XXIII

Since it is for you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that this vagrom journal has been written, I should deem myself derelict and insincere if I did not convey to you in every detail the sort of creature you were in middle life. If you fail to approve of your progenitor, I shall know that I have been exact, for I fail to approve of him myself.

We are at war. Every fiber in me should thrill to the President's declaration of war against Germany, but here I have been calmly turning the pages of "The Description of a Maske", by Thomas Campion (S. Dunstone's Churchyard in Fleetstreet 1607). It is a beautiful volume in excellent preservation, one of five brought in by a young man who is going to enlist. He inherited them from a grandfather, possibly an old fellow like you, who held them precious. I bought them eagerly, for I know where I can dispose of them, though I should dearly like to place them in my own shelves. We shall make a profit on them, and a handsome one. That is the sort of thought that runs through my head, Randolph Byrd, aet. 70, and that is the sort of man you were thirty odd years ago. You never were young in your youth, my fine friend. Perhaps you will grow younger as you grow older.

But that is not all. Above the sensuous pleasure in the books and overriding the thought of lucre, is the strange romance of Alicia and your namesake, Randolph Pendleton. It blasts all my previous conceptions of romance. Where is the color and the warmth and the glory of it? I had expected after their announcement of a few days ago that I should be bitterly engaged in watching a glorious April dawn that would blind me with its strange flames because it was not for me. Instead I seem to see only a somber murky twilight whenever I surprise those two in private colloquy. The mere thought of the possibility of Alicia loving me (fantastic arrogance!) was wont to irradiate my heart and to make me positively light-headed, so that I could scarcely withhold my lips from smiling publicly. But my young cub of a nephew seems haggard and obsessed by care, and upon Alicia's eyes I have more than once observed traces of tears.

What can be the meaning of that?

Were I in reality a parent instead of masquerading as one, I should no doubt endeavor to fathom this mystery. But you see, I am still, as always, inadequate. The truth is, I dare not yet talk to Alicia about her love. A little later, Randolph Byrd, a little later—when the pain is more decently domesticated in my bosom and will not fly out like a newly unchained hound. Meanwhile is it not best that I fasten my attention upon Thomas Campion his Maske?

I may fill a little of the interim perhaps by telling you what I had passed over in the busy silence of the last two or three years, that Fred Salmon has attempted to make amende honorable. Fred Salmon, who was the means of my losing all of the meager capital you should have lived upon in your old age, has reappeared with a commendable attempt at restitution.

Begoggled and be-linen-dustered, he drove up to the châlet some ten months ago in a magnificently shining car of bizarre design and he entered my door booming like not too distant thunder.

"Hello, Ranny!" he shouted out, and in a twinkling my study seemed to be brimming with him, inundated by him, overflowing with Fred and his Salmonism. "Have a cigar, my boy—how are you?—how is the family?—how is the book business?"

"Which am I to answer first?" I grinned mildly.

"Never mind!" roared Fred. "I see you're all right. Ask me how's tricks with me?" He was so obviously bursting with news that I complied at once.

"Very well—how are your tricks, Fred?"

"Booming, booming, Randolph, my boy—and kiting! Jack Morgan himself wouldn't blush to be in what I've got into! Put that on your piano, Randolph, my boy!"

Fred is one of those who likes to talk of Jack Morgan, Harry Davison, Gene Meyer and Barney Baruch, as though they were his daily cocktail companions. This distant familiarity of moneyed men gives him a strange exuberance.

"Consider that I have tried it on my piano and like the prelude," I told him. "Now for the rest of the opus."

"O-puss! Oh, fudge!" he laughed. "Gosh! You're a great old bird, Rannie—great old bird! Well, listen here, fellah—" he ran on, wild horses could not have held him—"you think I like to brag, don't you? Don't deny it—you know you do! Well, it's God's truth, Randolph, I do. Some folks are like that—me, for instance. But I had nothing to brag about, see? So I made up my mind I'd get into something so good it could stand any amount of bragging. So what do I do, but go into oil—oil, Randolph, my lad—and now I've got it—I've got it! Rich? Say, I'm going to be filthy with it, Randolph, positively oozing, crawling with money. That's how it's with me, boy!"

"Congratulations!" I held out my hand. He gripped it hard. "And what do you do with your millions?" I added blandly.

"Oh, I ain't got 'em yet!" he shouted. "But they're coming, Randolph—they're on the way, on the way! I hear the sound of their dear little golden feet right now—sweetest sound you ever heard. And that reminds me!—" And on a sudden he opened his duster and from his bosom pocket brought forth a number of dazzling yellow certificates with gorgeous blood red seals upon them.

"See these?" his large features were beaming a noon-day flood of generosity. "Remember that twenty-five thousand you put in of your own spondulix just before Salmon and Byrd went blooy? Well, this is that! Here is a thousand shares of Salmon Oil to cover that, Randolph—and some day you'll cash in with interest, my boy—big interest too—and don't you forget it!"

I stared at him in silence for a space. But so genuine and sincere seemed his air of righteous triumph that I repressed the Rabelaisian laughter that shook me inwardly and only said:

"Thank you, Fred. You're a—white man."

"Don't say a word!" shouted Fred, thumping me on the back. "It's all to the good!"

"By the way," I could not help adding after a glowing moment, "what is the stock selling at now?"

Not for nothing am I the partner of the canny Andrews.

"Oh, now," retorted Fred in a tone somewhat injured at my lack of romanticism—"now it ain't selling at all—yet! It's not issued yet, see? We haven't floated it yet. I'm giving you this out of mine. You can't sell it for a year. This is organizer's stock. But never fear, my boy, this will net you more than twenty-five thousand some day, or my name's Hubbard Squash!"

There was nothing to do but to hail Fred as a philanthropist and humanitarian and to thank him for his golden-hued certificates,—sweet augury of fabulous riches to come. I keep a small iron safe in my study now to house such precious objects as the Campion Maske and the Caxton that I bring home overnight or longer for study and collation. Very solemnly I clicked the combination lock, opened the safe and carefully, with ritualistic, almost hieratic movements, I reverently put Fred's certificates into one of the little drawers. Fred watched me attentively. That ceremony seemed to answer his sense of the dramatic.

"Yes, sir!" he nodded with great satisfaction, as a period to my movements. "You have put away a little gold mine there, my boy. And you don't have to work it, either. I'll do that! All you'll have to do is to cash the dividend checks. And a word in your ear, Randolph: If I 'phone you and tell you to buy more, just you do it, boy—just you do it!" Without describing to him my momentary mental reservation I, as it were, promised.

"And, oh, say," bubbled Fred, struck by a sudden memory, "who do you think is in on this property with me? You'd never guess in the world, so might as well tell you! It's our old college chum, Visconti—the guinea—and a great little sport that guinea is, let your uncle Fred tell you. He's got the spondulix, boy, and he'll have more, he will. He'll strike it rich on this deal, you bet your hat, and he'll be richer than ever. And say!" one idea seemed to follow another in Fred's brain like salmon running over rapids. "Hasn't he got a peacherine of a daughter, the old boy? Know her? Great girl, Gina—wonderfully good sport! She and I—say, we're great pals, that girl and I—cabarets, dancing"—and he shook and quivered in a sudden fragmentary movement of the latest dance—"great sport!" he concluded, panting ponderously.

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" I heard myself murmuring.

"Here! What you praying about?" demanded Fred, humorously suspicious.

"It was an invocation, Fred," I explained, "it's the most wonderful thing I ever heard. Why, you and Gina are meant for each other. She's a fine American girl"—I almost said "fina Americana girl," "and you—you're a—you were simply created for each other!"

"Say," grinned Fred exultantly, "honest, Randolph, do you think so?"

"I do, most certainly."

"Well, well—wait and see. Stop, look, listen—watchful waiting is the word," he muttered mysteriously. "Ta-ta, old man, I've got to shoot away from here. Now remember what I said: Don't buy until you hear from me, nor don't sell until you hear from me!"

"Stay to lunch," I begged. "After all, it's Sunday."

"Sorry, can't," he returned importantly. "Big things brewing. See you again. Ta-ta!" And he was gone.

Such was the recrudescence of Fred Salmon and the certificates are still in my safe in witness of it, and greatly to my surprise they have a market value now, even though I cannot sell them. Judging by the curb quotations the golden-hued leaflets are worth ten thousand dollars to-day. But I know too well that something will happen before the year is up and they will be worthless again. How should it be otherwise, since they are mine?

Fred Salmon was never meant to be a whisperer or a negotiator of secret treaties. The children in the house that Sunday morning could not fail to overhear him and ever since he has been known to them and referred to as "Brewster's Millions."

There is no contour to life. Life is chaotic. Whenever I thought of Fred as marrying at all, I had mentally mated him with Gertrude. That, in my opinion, would have been an ideally eugenic combination. But instead, Fred is obviously attaching himself to Gina and Gertrude has been eighteen months married to Minot Blackden, the rediscoverer of glass-staining. They live happily in apartments, about a mile apart, and I am told breakfast together occasionally.

And this notation, oh, my aged correspondent, proves to me that I am not a novelist. For were I a novelist, I should doubtless idealize these pictures—romanticize as I note them. Gertrude—my old cold flame, Gertrude—married to Blackden! There ought to be a chapter of that—a veritable lyric epithalamium upon those highly modern spousals. Blackden should fix them forever in a series of stained-glass windows!

Instead of that, my feeling is, "What am I to Gertrude now, or what is Gertrude to me? No more than Hecuba to the Player in 'Hamlet.'" Always in place of romance, reality seems to break in, to take possession of my pen and, willy-nilly, I find myself recording events as they happen, without varnish or adornment.

But if my pen is so veracious as I have intimated above, why is it so overproud and under-honest as not to record the torture that persists beneath the seemingly calm surface of life, the agony, the anguish of seeing Alicia daily under unaltered conditions, the same beloved Alicia, yet with a barrier reared before her to which the screen of the Sleeping Beauty was a miserable clipped privet hedge, to which Brynhild's circle of fire was a pitiful conjuror's trick?

Having been forced by the pressure of circumstance into ordered and natural life, I am now maddened by a passion to straighten it altogether out of its odd contortions and entanglements. My soul cries out to live naturally and virtually whispers to me every day that natural living is the first requisite to constructively social living. I see heights glimmering of service, of great impersonal love—but only through personal love lies my path toward them.

In other words, I am now aware that you cannot, like another Aaron Latta, "violate the feelings of sex." A few primal instincts there are, so tremendously important, so powerfully imbedded in the human, in the animal organism, that to violate them is to twist and crumple the personality, the very soul within one—life itself. A normal man must wive and beget and rear before his imagination is disentangled and freed for the constructive and corporate life of humanity—before his use to society is real and stable, reliable and not a sham.

I have reared children, but I have never had a wife or ever begotten any children of my own. Alicia embodies the completion of life for me—and Alicia is now pledged to some one else, leaving my world empty and meaningless. Come what will and avoid me as she may, existence cannot go on in this manner. I must take the risk of private talk with Alicia—to my pain, possibly, but for my information inevitably. Is she in reality in love with my nephew?

"Alicia," I began gruffly this evening after dinner, "I want to talk to you. Will you come into my study in a few minutes?"

She lifted her eyes to mine searchingly for an instant and lowered them again swiftly.

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured. There are times when I feel I could jump out of my skin, as the phrase is, when she calls me Uncle Ranny. That "uncleship" has been my undoing. Yet what a wealth of prerogatives it has brought me!

I chose this evening because somehow all the world lay tranquillized. Gusts of wind and plumps of April rain during the day gave way to a great stillness even over this suburban countryside, where the rumble of the trains is never absent; but the humid smell of the newly stirring earth was still in my nostrils and our little lawn was already green with young grass. One could almost hear the sap mounting in the trees. There was a vernal feeling of peace and hope in the house—in my very nerves.

We were in particular good humor moreover under the influence of Jimmie's table talk. That boy is a source of constant delight and bubbles vitality like a fountain. His presence in a room positively gives the effect of added light. He is just now in love with long words and announced that he "would give me a composition on how to tie a necktie." He meant a demonstration and we all laughed heartily.

"Never mind," murmured Jimmie cheerfully to himself. "Demonstration—I won't forget that one."

Griselda declares he is exactly as I was at his age. But I am certain I never was half so delightful.

Laura was not with us. She is at a boarding-school at Rye this year and comes home only upon alternate week-ends. Laura, sweet and grave-faced like her mother, is never as hilarious as the rest of us often are. My nephew Randolph was also absent. He, I suppose, was dining at his eternal "frat house."

It occurred to me how happy we could be, just the three of us, Alicia, Jimmie and I—plus, of course, Griselda. Alicia is beautiful now with a tender coloring and movements of exuberant gayety that are like wine to the heart. When her face is animated and her eyes flashing with merriment, the house seems charged with the very elixir of delight. Of late, however, I have seen little of her gayety and more of her pensive, silent mood and that has been depressing. But to-night Alicia was her old lovely self of the days before the engagement and I seized the occasion to discover what I could about that puzzle.

Alone in my study, puffing at a cigarette which might have been a string of hemp for all the taste I discerned in it, I feasted my mental eyes for the nth time upon the picture of Alicia married to me, greeting me as a wife upon my home-coming at night, nestling in my arms for the delicious intimate fragmentary talk of the day lived through, of the myriad little threads that take their place in the woof of life only after the beloved has touched them with her love. The long quiet evenings of intimacy and the nights which, in Goethe's phrase, become a beautiful half of the life span.

Am I immoral, O Randolph of seventy? Then I dismally fear I am immoral. For these are the pictures, old man, and these the thoughts that produce them—bad as they certainly are for me. For Alicia is my ward—my child. And whatever happens she must not suspect them. With an effort and a corrugated brow I dismissed them as I heard Alicia's step on the doorway. Very straight and demure she was as she entered, bringing with her that aura of infinitude which always quickens my foolish pulses.

"Sit down, Alicia," I waved her to a chair with an attempt at a smile.

"Is anything the matter, Uncle Ranny?"

"No—no—nothing—" with exaggerated naturalness. "I only wanted to talk to you."

"Wasn't Jimmie cunning!" she laughed, slipping into a chair. "He says he is going to be a writer like Mark Twain and let you sell his books. This environment, he says, is enough to make a writer of any fellow." I laughed.

"Tell me, Alicia—" I began briskly enough, and then, noting her eyes upon me, those deep eyes of a woman, I faltered:

"Do you—did you—when did this love affair between you and Randolph begin?"

Alicia made no answer.

"Was it sudden—spontaneous—like that?" and I snapped my fingers, still clinging to the spirit of lightness with which we had left the table.

"I have loved all of them—always," she murmured, gazing downward, "ever since I've been with them."

"I know that—so have I—so do I—" and my laugh sounded in my own ears like the grating of rough metallic surfaces together. "But I don't go marrying you all—do I? That's a very serious business, Alicia, this marrying."

How dull and prosy the words fell upon the air about me! Does middle age mean being prosy when you mean to be alert, bright and crisp? Yet I feel younger than any of them.

Her face lifting slowly and her wide-open gray eyes searching mine suddenly struck me as so piteously sad that I then and there wrote myself down an ass and a cad and turned away to hide my shame.

"I know it's serious, Uncle Ranny!" and her voice was like the muted strings of a violin. "But don't you think I understand? Please don't be afraid of me—won't you trust me—please?" And she left her chair and made a step toward me with an imploring gesture of the hands.

"I am not a designing woman," she declared, with a half smile, and then she ran on more vehemently, "I know that Randolph is younger than I. He can tire of me a hundred times before he is ready to marry. Oh, we are a long way from marrying. But he—he begged me to—to be engaged to him and—and for certain reasons that I can't tell any one, I agreed. And I'll keep my word if he keeps—" and there she paused.

A solemn, quite maternal tenderness in her face as she uttered those words so fascinated me that suddenly I saw her anew—a new Alicia—and with a strange tug at the heartstrings I marveled at the miracle.