I

A year or two ago Hugh Hyrtl was absolutely unknown; if it be different today, it is because of the following curious circumstances:

To begin with, he was an artist⁠—a young artist, a good artist, a good-looking artist⁠—but he was anything but a rich artist, and, as I have intimated, unknown. There were days when he was not certain whether he would dine or not, but, being young, he was hopeful, and, being hopeful, courageous. His atelier, which was also his bedroom and parlor, overlooked the courtyard of a great house on Tompkins Square.

Tompkins Square is not a locality over which Fashion presides, and Hugh, who was dainty in his ways, hated it as thoroughly as it is possible for an honest young fellow to hate anything. But Tompkins Square is perhaps the least expensive residential quarter of New York, and there Hugh was able to achieve the impossible⁠—to dream of Fame and live on a dollar a day.

Meanwhile he was at work on that great picture which everyone has since seen⁠—Heliogabalus smothering men with flowers. The picture had plenty of color, plenty of action, plenty of archaeology, and Hugh was beginning to feel that it might be a success when one fine day, as he happened to be retouching the gold sigma on which the little emperor lounged and laughed, a window opposite his own was thrown open, and the initial incident of the accompanying drama occurred.

Across the court there came a trill, then a burst of song, a roulade of sheer joy such as is always pleasant to intercept, but particularly so when you happen to be in the youth of life and the youth of the year. Hugh looked up. In the opposite window was a girl⁠—a pretty girl; yet when I say pretty I mean that prettiness which, when you see it, makes you want to jump straight down the possessor’s throat. It was the prettiness that comes with the eighteenth year to a girl who has blue eyes, kissable lips and a complexion of roses and cream.

When Hugh looked up the trill trembled and ceased. Four eyes had met. Hugh smiled, which was impertinent of him; the girl blushed, which was modest of her; then an old man appeared, one who neither blushed nor smiled, who looked exceeding cross and shut the window with a bang.

“Caesar, what a beauty!” Hugh exclaimed, and turned to the sigma once more. In a moment he looked across the court. The window was blank. “I wonder,” he mused, and whistled softly to himself; “I wonder if I haven’t got too much ochre stuck on there.” He looked again at the window across the court. “Bah!” he continued, “as if I could have too much ochre. It’s the purple on the laticlave that jars.”

For a little space he painted away very determinedly, the muscles of his jaw close set; then he looked again at the window⁠—there was no one, not even the cross old man.

“Oh, hang it all,” he cried. “I can’t work any more today!”

When an agile young fellow wants to, it doesn’t take him very long to get down six flights of stairs⁠—no, nor seven, either, however steep those stairs may be⁠—and presently Hugh entered a dingy den over which the janitress of the building presided.

The janitress was a fat person, with the voice of an ogre, and a great love for gossip and tenants who paid their way. Hugh never gossiped, but he had a smile which had won her heart, all ogress that she was. She laughed as he entered and flourished a broom.

“Mrs. O’Hassadam,” he began, “you are looking very handsome this morning. I⁠—”

“Don’t be flattering an old lady like meself, Mr. Hyrtl, but say to me just plainly what you want, with no nonsense whatever.”

“Then, Mrs. O’Hassadam, as you love righteousness and abhor mammon, tell me who those people are that live up there on the other side of the court, yes, on the sixth story where the geranium is?”

“No great shakes, Mr. Hyrtl.”

“What!”

“No great shakes, Mr. Hyrtl.”

“But the girl?”

“No great shakes, I keep telling you; a gadabout, that’s what she is, with an ex-convict for a pa.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” cried Hugh, indignantly, “no, not one word.”

“Question a lady’s veracity, Mr. Hyrtl? Where are your manners, Mr. Hyrtl. Mr. Hyrtl, mind what I am telling you. For ten years that old forger has been here, and, since I can remember, not a letter has come for him whatever, not a soul has come to see him and not once has he put his foot out of this door. Question a lady’s word!”

“But⁠—”

“It’s a murderer he is, I am a-thinking, and as for that gal, she’s no better than she should be whatever at all, sitting there where anyone can see her, where I can see her, a-trying to make eyes at you.”

“But⁠—”

“Oh, I know very well you’re forever in your paintbox and pay no attention to likes of her. It’s annoying you, she is, that’s what she’s doing, in a respectable house like this, besides.”

“But⁠—”

“And what is it you want, whatever?” Mrs. O’Hassadam abruptly inquired of a little man, sadly shabby in appearance, who had loomed in the door. “There’s no old bottles today.”

“And if there were I wouldn’t want them,” the little man retorted, defiantly; “unless they were full. It’s lodgings I’m after.”

“It is, is it? Well, then, you’d better try and find them in some nice little place on Fifth Avenue where they’ll only charge you five dollars if you ring the bell and ten dollars if you don’t. This establishment wouldn’t suit you at all.”

And Mrs. O’Hassadam made a skirmish with her broom.

“Lodgings, indeed,” she added, indignantly; “why not chambers, self-contained, with private entrance. Be off, or I’ll call the police. Mr. Hyrtl⁠—”

Hugh had sidled out, pretending not to hear. Presently he was on the sidewalk. Beyond was the Square, deluged by the eager sunlight of a radiant noon; near at hand was a junkshop, and a step or two further on a window in which, temptingly arranged, were coils of sausages, red beefsteak, yellow fowl and a glistening ham. For a second, in sheer perplexity, Hugh stopped; yet, as he loitered there, he saw nothing of the contents of that window⁠—it was what another had held that memory was reproducing, and, as the convolutions of fancy waned and subsided, he found himself staring at the individual whom Mrs. O’Hassadam had ordered to be off.

“Well, sir, do you take me for a freak?”

He was a stout, little man, with a long beard and the restless eyes of a ferret, distressingly shabby, the more so even that in his shabbiness was the unmistakable air of better days.

Hugh started from his reverie.

“Not a bit,” he answered, gently. “I am an artist, and if I stared at you it was because you look like a Roman Senator.”

“Why not a satyr? So you are an artist, eh? Well, where have I seen you before⁠—in Lisbon, Liverpool or Leghorn?”

“Truly,” Hugh answered, “I have never been so far away.”

“You haven’t, haven’t you?” And the little man scrutinized the artist’s face. “All the same, I’ll be blowed if you don’t remind me of someone. Thundering guns, how cold it is!”

“Why, it must be seventy-five, at least.”

“Yes, I dare say⁠—to those who have breakfasted, to those who dined last night and the night before; but when a man hasn’t eaten for forty-eight hours the rarest day of June is colder than Christmas Eve. Thundering guns!”

“You don’t mean to say⁠—”

“Yes, I do mean to say. Now, tell me how I can earn a dollar at once⁠—not tomorrow or tonight, but right now.”

And the little man, who had been looking very fiercely at Hugh, suddenly seemed about to collapse. Hugh caught him by the arm.

“Here, come with me,” he said.

In a moment both were seated at a table of the eating-shop within.

“Take some coffee first,” said Hugh, authoritatively, “and then⁠—”

“Oh, you’re going to treat, are you? Well, now, my name is John Anderson⁠—yes, sir, John Anderson, my Joe John⁠—and it doesn’t rhyme with either beat or sponge. I won’t be treated. I may be indigent, but I am proud. Besides, if I had twopence I could become a millionaire.”

“You will let me,” said Hugh, seductively, “make you a little loan. I have two dollars, here is one. Pay me when you are a millionaire.”

At the sight of the coin the little man turned purple.

“Thundering guns!” he muttered, “yesterday I passed an hour at the Metropolitan Museum looking at a gold piece in a case. Give me your name and address.”

Before the open door of the eating-house a slender figure passed. Hugh jumped from his seat. It was she, he could have sworn. The little man caught him by the arm.

“Your name and address,” he repeated.

Hugh shook himself loose. In a second he was in the street. The slender figure was just turning the corner, but Hugh was right behind. When at last he overtook that slender figure he discovered that it belonged to a sallow brunette.

At the table in the eating-house the little man was muttering:

“But where the deuce have I seen him before?”

II

The next morning Hugh was hard at work gain. The painting before him was a wonder to behold. It represented a hall, similar to the interior of a temple⁠—one in which fluted columns rose and met the dome; about it ran a gallery, and there, Heliogabalus, a painted boy of fifteen, lounged and laughed; near him were the magi come from afar to witness the nuptials of the Sun and Moon; opposite were musicians, and a little beyond a group of slaves were emptying huge baskets of lilies on the assembled guests beneath. Some of the latter, in flowers up to the waist, were trying to escape, but the door was barred. Others, aided by yellow couches, were trying to scale the wall and reach the gallery above, and on these a steady rain of red and white buds descended. In a corner, an avalanche of roses and violets had fallen, and from it men were struggling, their arms crooked, their eyes dilated. From the dome a glare of sunlight smote the purple draperies, danced on the sea of flowers and put a rainbow in the air. It was very gorgeous, a riot of splendid color, and to Hugh it meant nothing less than an encounter with that gracious lady whose name is Fame.

He was at work then on the sigma of gold on which the little emperor lounged, and that gold he was endeavoring to marry harmoniously with the brass of the trumpets and the crocus of the harps. The night before, on his return after a long tramp through Central Park, he had determined not to look again at the window across the court; for to look was to fall in love, and to fall in love meant “Fame, farewell!” and also “Starvation, welcome!” In spite of which, however, no sooner was his light extinguished than he took a look. Save a single star that glowed and glimmered, there was not a thing to be seen. Thereupon, with all the strength of virtuous resolutions, he had wrapped himself in slumber and dreams of her. And now on this particular morning, he had not tried more than ten or a dozen times to see if she were there.

The sigma was done, its gold properly married with the crocus and brass, and Hugh was about to get to work on a heap of lilies and hyacinths when a fresh incident occurred. Someone was knocking at the door.

“Come in!” Hugh cried, without looking round. It was Mrs. O’Hassadam, he was sure.

But though he heard the door open, he heard nothing that indicated the presence of that lady; no rich, loud greeting and rustle of broom. He turned his head. On the threshold stood a man, very gaunt and sickly, a man who looked as though he had a bad digestion and a worse conscience; he seemed feeble, too, timorous and apologetic. His coat would not have caused envy in the heart of a backwoodsman, and his trousers were elaborately patched. One foot was shod with a slipper, the other with a shoe; both were rusty, and the man himself exhaled an indefinable odor of must and decay. At a glance Hugh recognized the cross old person who, the day before, had shut the opposite window with a bang.

“H’m!” he mused. “He’s going to call me to account for flirting with his daughter. Well, let him. Who’s afraid?”

“We are neighbors, sir,” the old man began, with a stealthy air and a covert look about him.

“Take a seat, I pray you,” said Hugh, politely.

“And being neighbors, I thought I would venture to call.”

“A compliment which does me much honor, and one which I trust you will permit me to repay,” Hugh answered, with a fine flourish. “Be seated, I beg of you.”

“You are a stranger here,” the old man added, thoughtfully; “but I have lived in this house for the past ten years.”

“Dear me!”

“Yes; ten years. I came here when my daughter Jenny was eight years old, and she is just eighteen today. She hasn’t always lived here, though. Until a few months ago she was away at school. She is a good girl, sir.”

To this statement Hugh nodded approvingly.

“It’s dull for her, very. She has no friends of her own age. I have not let her associate with the people hereabouts, and, as for myself, I am not much of a companion for a lass like her. Am I?”

Hugh tried his best to look complimentary. He failed, however, and said nothing. But the old man’s eyes were fixed on the floor and he ran on, unheeding:

“No, I am not, and she hasn’t any relatives, either. I am the last of my race. I am a Sisseton, and my brother Paul was killed at my side in the war. My wife, she died before I came here. So it’s dull for her, you see, very; and this being her birthday and you being a stranger, I just thought I might ask would you spend the evening with us?”

“Why, my dear Mr. Sisseton, nothing on earth, no, absolutely nothing could give me greater pleasure.”

“Well, then, that is settled. There will be some cake, and I don’t promise it, but there may be a glass of sweet wine.”

“I adore cake,” Hugh fairly shouted. “As for wine, I never touch it.”

“Don’t you, now?” And the old man looked up very sharply at Hugh. “Well, well, I have heard as much. I have heard⁠—But there, never mind. It’s settled, then, is it? We may expect you at eight?”

“To the minute, Mr. Sisseton.”

But he spoke to the walls. The old man had disappeared as in a trap, closing the door noiselessly as he went, and Hugh returned to his lilies.

The work progressed slowly enough after that, for between the canvas and the brush every now and again a face would appear⁠—one that was neither Roman nor Syrian, a bewilderment of yellow hair, blue eyes, kissable lips and a complexion of roses and cream.

“I am in luck,” Hugh decided. And had he not reached the austere age of three-and-twenty I promise you he would have danced for joy.

The afternoon took itself away. At six o’clock Hugh began touching up the dimmed splendor of a pair of patent-leather pumps which he found wrapped in an old newspaper at the bottom of his trunk. He got out his best coat and brushed it carefully; he got out a very large neckcloth, which he tied with the nicety of a geometrician; there was, he discovered, a crease still in his trousers, there was a pair of gloves that still could be worn, and⁠—though you or I would have expected to be cut dead by our best beloved had we dared to wear such a hat as his⁠—when he went out that evening for dinner no nicer, fresher, handsomer young fellow ever strode through Tompkins Square. Nevertheless, at one minute before eight precisely, when this hero of a midspring night rapped on an old man’s door his hand was trembling and he blushed like a girl.

It sounds like a phrase in a novel to say that the room into which he was then ushered was scrupulously neat, but it would take a maker of dainty ballads to describe its sweetness and simplicity. Barring the old man, who would have been a blur on a desert, there was not a thing in it that jarred. Two windows, which looked on the street, were hung with lace, which was imitation, of course, yet brilliantly white, and these curtains were looped to the wall with strips of canary silk that had probably come from a cigar-box. There were four chairs unconventionally arranged. There was one small table on which there was a large cake. There was another on which there was a lamp and a pink shade. On the walls were two colored lithographs, unframed, that were recognizedly supplements of a London weekly. In the air was the scent of innocence, and on one of the chairs, blushing like mad, sat the prettiest little girl in the world.

Hugh distinguished himself at once by tripping over a mat, and so confused was he that when his host mumbled some form of introduction he awkwardly stretched his hand and as awkwardly withdrew it.

“And are you very well, sir?” the young woman inquired, her head held a trifle to one side and in her eyes a manifest delight at finding him more embarrassed than herself.

Hugh declared that he had never felt better in his life. The young woman, in reply to a question which he then addressed, announced that her own health was perfect; the old man, duly interrogated, answered in the same strain, and then all three earnestly discussed the weather. Presently there was cake and lemonade, which Hugh lauded to the skies. Never had he eaten such ambrosia, never had he sipped such nectar; and, in the enthusiasm of the moment, he consented to play poker for imaginary stakes⁠—a game at which, at the expiration of an hour, he had lost not a penny less than two million dollars. At one moment, however, during the progress of the play he had everything in his own favor. A rap had come on the door, and the old man had jumped as though a dog under the table had bitten him on the leg. “Don’t let anyone in,” he beseeched. “Say I have moved; say I am dead. Here, let me get into the other room.” And with that he had risen, his face contracted, shaking in every limb. But already Jenny had gone to the door. It was a mistake, she announced. A visitor for another tenant. Thus reassured, gradually the old man’s calm returned and the game continued. When it was done, there was more ambrosia, more nectar, more small-talk, and, finally, the inevitable good night.

After Hugh had gone, father and daughter sat awhile in silence. Suddenly Jenny jumped to her feet and threw her arms about the old man’s neck.

“My darling papa, I love you!”

But what she meant by that absurd demonstration she did not wait to explain. She was out of the room and in her own in a second.

The old man heard her door close, and, taking the lamp, went to an anjoining chamber. It contained a bed, a chair, a bureau and a trunk. He put the lamp on the bureau and moved the bed. Then, kneeling down, he raised a plank from the floor and extracted a package wrapped in oilskin. This, with tender care, he opened, and drew out a bill of the nation of the value of one thousand dollars. Presently he drew out another of the game denomination, then a third, a fourth, until finally be had counted eighty-seven. And it would have been curious if he had not, for he had gone through the same operation almost seven thousand three hundred times⁠—that is to say, twice a day for nearly ten years.

III

Once planted, the germ of friendship blooms apace. Barely a fortnight had gone, and here were these three people on the best of terms. In the discreetest manner, Hugh had managed to ingratiate himself with the old man; he was serviceable, and he asked no questions. The timidity, the shrinking fear of strangers, which was the peculiar characteristic of this curious individual, he treated as he would have one of those natural afflictions, such as rheumatism or baldness, to which advanced age is subject and for which there is no cure. Certainly he made no allusion to it, but then he had so much to occupy him that it may be he gave it, if at all, little more than a passing thought.

Ah, yes! he had much to occupy him. Heliogabalus was indeed turned to the wall, but the atelier was bright with different studies of the same lead, luminous with blue eyes, yellow hair and complexions of roses and cream. Yet, for all his art, there was an intangible something in the original, a freshness, a vivacity, a charm that eluded him and escaped.

“I am too much in love to paint her properly,” he declared to himself; and as a matter of fact he was wholly, turbulently, absurdly in love with a girl whom he had known but a fortnight and of whose previous existence he had been absolutely unaware.

Of this state of affairs Jenny was seemingly ignorant. Now and again of an evening he sat with her and her father in that little sky-parlor where he had first tasted the food of the gods, and there, with a sentiment akin to reverence, listened to the sweet music of her words. Sometimes, when the evening happened to be clear, they took a stroll among the factory girls and mechanics in the Square, and sometimes they would sit awhile on one of the benches and discuss subjects in which⁠—by comparison to one, the great one as yet unbroached⁠—the interest was probably feigned; for there were times when their conversation, however animated, would subside and cease, and the wonder of love would be upon them. These silences, painfully awkward, indeed, Hugh would break with snatches of verse⁠—lines of Owen Meredith, that poet of the nineteenth century who died the other day in his beloved France; quatrains of Browning, too; and once the ill-mannered young fellow recited a conceit of Leigh Hunt’s:

“Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief who love to get
Sweets upon your list, put that in⁠—
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that wealth and health have missed me,
Say I’m growing old; but add,
Jenny kissed me.”

At this impertinence, however, the girl’s face took on such mantling hues, that for very shame her companion was obliged to drop into sedater measures, and divert her attention with astronomical hypotheses in regard to the moon, which, at that moment, happened to be suspended above them, a slender sickle of gold.

In parishes like Tompkins Square, that pomp of Satan, which we have agreed to call Etiquette, is not always as punctiliously observed as it is in fairer precincts; and a day or two later when Hugh had related the disadvantages under which he labored, when trying, in the absence of the model, to get a certain face on canvas, not Miss Jenny Sisseton, no, nor her father, either, saw the slightest objection to her sitting in propria persona to this audacious young man. What need had they of our effete survival of the duenna of the past? Theirs was a solitude as harmless, yes, and as fragrant, as that of two flowers on separate stalks.

But one dazzling noon, it so happened, that this young woman, after sitting for at least ten minutes as quiet as a mouse, pouted her pretty lips, and looking straight at Hugh, who was painting them very determinedly, remarked with an air of sweet unconcern:

“Why don’t you tell me something of yourself?”

“Why?” Hugh echoed. “Because there is nothing to tell, I suppose. My life began⁠—” he was about to say, “when I met you,” but he tacked adroitly⁠—“the first time I saw an oil-painting. I was a child then, and ever since I have dreamed of being an artist.”

“But you are.”

“No, an apprentice, merely. And yet when I think of my first efforts, my one grief is that my poor mother could not have lived to see the progress I have made. She never believed much in art, but she did believe in me.”

“Is it long since⁠—”

“Since she died? Yes, it is a long time ago. I was at school in Baltimore; a message came and they sent me to her at once. Our home was in Virginia, a little cottage not far from Richmond. There my mother lived with only an old negress to assist her. When I arrived, she was dead. Some excitement, the receipt of a letter, the old woman said, and she had sent for me, but she had sent too late. After the funeral I barred the windows, locked the door and went back to school. But they did not keep me long. I had no money. The little income which my mother enjoyed died with her, and the cottage could not be sold until I came of age.”

“Did you sell it then?”

“No, indeed. I shall never sell it. My mother was born there and it was there she died.”

“Tell me of her,” Jenny murmured. “Are you like her?”

“No, they used to say not. I take after my father, I believe. He was a sailor, the captain of a merchantman, and was lost at sea. It was a terrible blow for my mother; she was left alone with but myself for consolation. It was that she used to call me, and I⁠—I loved her with all my heart.”

“I would have loved her, too,” Jenny sighed.

“If she could hear you, do you know what she would say?⁠—do you know, Jenny? She would say: ‘My dear child, I love you, too. I love you because you are sweet and good, because you are tenderhearted, because you are the loveliest, best and dearest girl in all the world, because you have filled my boy’s life with living springs, because you are the future to him, and hope and fame.’ That is what she would say to you, Jenny, and she would add, I know: ‘Love him, Jenny, for my sake if you cannot love him for his own.’ ”

“But I do love you,” said the young woman, with great decision. “Didn’t you know it?”

At this unexpected avowal Hugh stood very still, his brush in the air; then the brush fell, and suddenly he was at her side, an arm about the whiteness of her neck, his lips on hers.

“Here! Here! Stop that!”

The two culprits separated so quickly that neither were quite sure whether the kiss had been given or yet returned. Across the court, in the window opposite, Mr. Sisseton glowered, imposing and irate.

“Stop that, I say!” he repeated. “You have no right to do that. No right at all. As for you, young man, go back to your easel. Jenny, don’t you move until I am there.”

In their innocence, a thunderbolt from a clear sky could not have startled more. Jenny hid her face in her hands and Hugh bit his fingers. A minute passed, that seemed an hour long, then another, a third, a fourth; finally there came a shuffle in the hall and the old man entered, this time without the formality of a rap.

“Now, sir⁠—” he began.

“Mr. Sisseton,” Hugh interrupted, “I swear to you it is the first time, and I swear to you, also, it would not have occurred if⁠—if⁠—”

“Well, sir, if what? If I hadn’t brought you together, perhaps. And do you suppose I didn’t do it on purpose?”

“What!”

“Precisely. Now will you be good enough to inform me what your intentions are?”

“My intentions are to marry your daughter, if she will do me the honor to become my wife.”

“Oh, they are, are they? And have you any reason to think that she will consent?”

“He knows that I will,” said that forward young woman.

“It’s come to that pass, has it?” muttered the tyrant. “Very good. Now, Mr. Hyrtl, perhaps you will answer a question. How do you propose to support her?”

Hugh’s answer was in the expression which he then assumed, one pathetic enough to have mollified a tiger. But Mr. Sisseton was either not to be mollified or else he demanded something more explicit than pantomime.

“Well, sir?” he growled.

“Well, sir,” Hugh at last made answer, “I am young, strong, ambitious, and it seems to me⁠—”

“Fiddlesticks! So was I young, strong, ambitious, and it seemed to me that I was quite capable of supporting a wife on just those things for capital. The result was not satisfactory. I have had the experience, though, and on the day when my wife, outworn with privation and misery, died, I swore that my daughter should never marry a pauper.”

Hugh raised a hand in protest.

“Unless,” the old man continued, “unless my daughter happened to be an heiress.”

“Oh, papa, papa,” sobbed Jenny, “how can you be so cruel!”

Mr. Sisseton went to the door, opened it, peered out in the corridor, then closing it again, took a seat in the middle of the room and stared at Hugh as though he had never seen him before.

“What day of the month is it?” he asked, abruptly.

“Really⁠—”

“Come now, a clever young fellow like you ought to tell me like a shot.”

“It’s the 10th,” said Hugh, morosely.

“The 10th of what?”

“The 10th of June,” sobbed Jenny.

“The 10th of June, is it?” the old man repeated, meditatively, “the 10th of June. Dear me, dear me, how time flies! Well, it being the 10th of June⁠—You are quite sure, are you, that it is the 10th of June?”

“Yes, yes,” Hugh and Jenny answered in chorus.

“Well, it being the 10th of June, I may say, in confidence, of course, I may say that my daughter is an heiress.”

“An heiress!” the girl exclaimed.

“As if I cared,” said Hugh.

“Well, you might just as well care, then,” the old man retorted. “For if she were not, she would never be your wife. No, sir, never. However, in the circumstances, and in view of the fact that today is the 10th of June, I may congratulate you. Jenny will have eighty-seven thousand dollars.” And drawing from his pocket a package done up in oilskin, the old man displayed to the startled lovers a roll of banknotes of fabulous size.

“But where did you get them from?” Jenny gasped.

Up to this point the old man had conducted himself with the assurance and bravado of a stockbroker, but that simple little question seemed to have precisely the same effect on him that the prick of a pin has on a toy balloon. He collapsed.

“Why⁠—why,” he stammered at last, “they belonged to your mother.”

“But only a moment ago you said she died of privation and want.”

“I saved them out of my pension, then.”

“Papa! Out of your pension! Fifty pensions like yours wouldn’t make that amount.”

The old man turned upon her, with recovered strength.

“Do you take me for a thief?” he gnashed.

“Perhaps you have a reason of your own,” said Hugh, “for not wishing to tell where the money came from.”

“I have. I have a dozen. I have a thousand.”

“Let us say no more about it, then. For my part, I regard you as above suspicion.”

“So do I,” said Jenny.

“And it’s lucky you do,” bawled the old man, all his former assurance and bravado returning. “It’s mighty lucky you do. You don’t know what a narrow squeeze you’ve had. You don’t either of you know of what I am capable when I’m vexed. But what do you mean, anyway, by asking me questions? Such impudence!”

“There, there, papa,” murmured Jenny.

“Yes, miss, such impudence! Now, you can accept what I choose to give you and accept it, too, with a devilish good grace or⁠—or that’s the end of the marriage. I’ll pack you off to a convent, by gad, that’s just what I’ll do with you.”

And as he made these direful threats the fierce old man fairly chuckled.

“I’ll be good as gold,” said Jenny, seraphically.

“Well, you had better, and so had that lackadaisical simpleton there. Now, let us talk about the wedding. Good Heavens, what’s that?”

There had come on the door a knock that would have waked the dead. The old man jumped as though stung by a wasp.

“Don’t let anyone come in,” he entreated. “Barricade the door, hide me somewhere.”

His hands were trembling so that he could hardly get the oilskin package back in his pocket. His face was haggard and his eyes dilated, and suddenly he assumed the appearance of a hunted beast.

“Hide me,” he implored. “Don’t let anyone in!”

“But before either Hugh or Jenny could make even a pretense at obeying him, the door flew open and a little man with a long beard entered the room.

“Thundering guns!” he exclaimed, “I can’t congratulate you on your stairs.”

“Sir,” said Hugh, stepping forward, “to what do I owe the honor⁠—”

“Do you mean to say that you don’t remember me?”

“I do not, sir; and as I happen to be discussing family matters⁠—”

Mr. Sisseton beckoned frantically to Jenny, and slid like a shadow through the door.

“I will join you in a moment!” Hugh called after them. “Now, sir,” he continued; “what is it?”

“Nice gal, that,” said the stranger, appreciatively. “Why, there she is again, and again,” he added, pointing to the pictures that illuminated the room. “Is the old party her pa?”

“Sir, I am waiting⁠—”

“Thundering guns! so you are, dear boy. Let’s sit down; those stairs of yours would tire a resurrectionist.”

IV

The little man straddled a chair and gave a tug at his beard.

“A nice fellow, you are,” he muttered, with a fine show of indignation. “You save a man’s life and forget all about him. What kind of behavior is that? I was starving last month and you loaned me a dollar. Here it is.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Hugh, a trifle mollified; “I remember you now.”

“I should have repaid it before, but I didn’t have it.”

“Excellent reason; but then there was no hurry. I don’t see how you found me, though.”

“No trouble about that; all I had to do was to ask that fat harridan downstairs; the difficulty was to get the coin. After you bolted I had something to eat and invested the change in pencils, which I peddled at a profit, turned the proceeds into fancy notions; and, here I am, hale and hearty, with the future before me and a cool hundred in my pocket.”

“Bravo!” said Hugh. “I like your grit.”

“Bah! I’ll be a millionaire yet, and buy some of your pictures⁠—that one, for instance; the pretty girl who is to be your wife.”

“And how the dickens did you know that?”

“I’m quick as a flash, that’s what I am. I can catch on quicker than any man you ever saw. But anyone would have known what was going on here. Bless your dear soul, I had only to catch a glimpse of her sweet face to know what was up. You’re not painting her picture for money, I’ll be bound.”

“Sir,” cried Hugh, irritated in spite of himself by the free and easy form of address, “I am very busy, and if⁠—”

“Tut, tut. I have taken a fancy to you and you mustn’t be cross. Besides, it’s only my way. Let me tell you my story.”

“What for?”

“That you may know who I am, of course. I may look seedy, but I’m a man worth cultivating. You never heard of such an extraordinary fellow as I am. I have had a career that is simply marvelous. At twelve I was running a printing press in Toronto. The next year I made a fortune off a patent bit, and lost it in a night bucking the tiger. I have been an aeronaut, a telegraph operator, a nabob and a cook. I have followed a dozen trades⁠—some honest, some not. I have engineered companies out of which millions have been made. I have been a miner in Arizona, in Cape Colony, in Peru I had the concession for lighting St. Petersburg with electricity and the charter for trams in Madras. I have handled cargoes of elephant tusks and smuggled opium in books. I have been a three-card monte man on the Pacific slope and led revivals in Maine. The Wandering Jew is nothing to me. I have been everywhere, seen everything, and, though I am sixty years old, I am strong as an ox. With this hundred I shall open a cigar-shop. When I have a thousand to my credit I’ll take a hack at the Street.”

“With what?”

“With my brains, of course. What is there wonderful about speculating with the ready? Thundering guns! give me fifty thousand today and in a month I’ll quadruple it.”

“Or go broke.”

“Not a bit of it. What will you wager I don’t make a million? I am lucky, not a doubt of it, and I have ideas. My head is full of them. Anything suggests them⁠—a tune from a barrel-organ, a sign in a window, a remark overheard and retained, the first paper I pick up; here, for instance⁠—”

And the little man, leaning forward, picked up a newspaper which lay on the table. It was the one from which, a month before, Hugh had taken his pumps and which, with artistic indifference, he had suffered to remain where it fell.

“Thundering guns!”

With the agility of a clown the little man had sprung to his feet, his eyes glued to the paper. His face was always red, but suddenly it had grown bright purple.

“What is the number of this house?” he blurted.

“Seventeen.”

“Tompkins Square?”

Hugh nodded.

“Is there anyone here by the name of Sisseton?”

“Yes,” Hugh answered, blankly astonished. “But why do you ask?”

“Where does he live? Tell me at once.”

“Over there,” Hugh replied, with a gesture. “It was with him I was talking when you came in.”

“Thundering guns!”

With the bound of a panther the little man sprang at the door and vanished downstairs, crossed the court, mounted the other stairway, the paper still in his hand and Hugh at his heels.

“It is here, isn’t it?” he cried, over his shoulder, and burst into the Sisseton parlor.

Jenny was practicing on a typewriter and her father was beating a tattoo on the window, but at the sudden eruption both started and turned.

“Are you Mr. Rufus Sisseton?” the little man gasped. Mr. Sisseton seemed incapable of reply. He looked as though paralysis was claiming him as its own. It was Jenny who answered in his stead.

“In that case,” the little man announced, “my name is John Anderson and I am⁠—”

He had no time to add more; Mr. Sisseton uttered one faint moan, raised his hands and fell into a chair.

Jenny made a dash at him. “Papa, papa!” she cried, “what is it?”

“The end,” he groaned. “Love, matrimony, everything you have dreamed is over.”

Under Jenny’s ministrations, presently he was again on his feet, and motioning to the little man he went with him into the adjoining room.

The two lovers stared for a second into each other’s eyes. On the floor the paper lay. Hugh caught it up, and after a glance at the headlines turned to the advertisements. One of them, which he read aloud, ran as follows:

“The next of kin of Humphery Anderson, who died the 10th of June, 1880, will learn something to their advantage by addressing Mr. Rufus Sisseton, 17 Tompkins Square.”

V

“Well, sir,” said the little man, when Mr. Sisseton had closed the door. “What am I to learn to my advantage?”

At the moment Mr. Sisseton was enjoying the spectacle of that mental panorama in which the past unfolds and which is said to visit those about to drown. Ten years before, to a day, on a delightful June morning he had taken the express for Boston. Jenny was at school in a suburb of that city, and it was to see her that the excursion had been planned. He was not an accomplished traveler. Thus far his journeys⁠—save that terrible one which we call the War⁠—had been uneventful and few; as clerk in a wholesale grocery-shop his opportunities for travel had been slight; but a pension for which he had diligently petitioned to the Government had been granted, and to celebrate the occasion the firm he served had allowed him a holiday. On that morning he was therefore in the best of spirits, and as the train moved from the Grand Central Station he hummed very contendedly to himself. The distressing ugliness of the outlying districts were passed unmarked; it was the fragrance of Connecticut intervals that first attracted his attention; then he fell to musing about the possible existence of the people who dwelled in the roomy, white homesteads that appeared and vanished, the vocations of the loungers at the trim little stations that starred the route. A desire for life in the country beset him; he began to picture the pleasures he would enjoy on some little farm where Jenny could grow up in health and innocence, and presently his head nodded and he was asleep.

When he awoke, or perhaps it would be more exact to say when he recovered his senses, he was running like a deer across an empty field, fleeing from death and disaster. Then he had gone back, striving as best he could to aid the survivors of that collision, which, for its unparalleled horror, is cited still. There was a woman whom he had dragged from the burning wreck of a car; a child, for whose frail life he had struggled, and finally, by sheer strength, he had torn a man from a twisted seat that was holding him on a grill of flame.

The latter was dying, his face agonized, a leg broken, another charred to the bone, but even in his agony he retained his faculties.

“Take this,” he had said to his rescuer, “and give it yourself to my⁠—”

At that the light had passed from his eyes; he was dead, and in Rufus Sisseton’s hand was a leather pocketbook on which the name Humphery Anderson shone in letters of gold.

When the old clerk reached New York his employers did not recognize him. He not only looked twenty years older, he seemed smitten with palsy. He took what money was due him, resigned his position and moved from the rooms he had occupied in St. Mark’s place to the less expensive region of Tompkins Square. He had but his pension now, and that pocketbook which contained absolutely nothing save a few memoranda and eighty-seven banknotes of the value of one thousand dollars each.

The memoranda related to the sale of a mine, but by whom or to whom there was not a word to indicate, and apart from them there was merely the name in gilt letters to show the ownership of the notes. Who was Humphery Anderson? Where had he come from? Where was he going? To whom had he wished this money to be given? These questions, and dozens of others which trod on their heels, Rufus Sisseton put ceaselessly and unavailingly to himself. The pockets of the man who had died before his eyes had been searched; there was a coarse handkerchief, two cigars, a handful of silver, a roll of small bills, a ticket to Boston, but not a clue to the identity of the deceased. His name, presumably, was Humphery Anderson, and that name Rufus Sisseton had given to the coroner and seen it chronicled in the list of the dead; but when a week went by, and no one claimed the body, the old clerk became uneasy. He put an advertisement in the Herald; there was no reply. He inserted another; the result was the same. It was then he resigned his position and moved to Tompkins Square.

Meanwhile he lived in a state of terror bordering on lunacy; death in the most terrible form had approached so close, the escape had been so narrow, that his nerves, never too strong at their best, had become unstrung. This his employers noticed, and were glad to have him go. But the thing which frightened him most, and of which no one save himself was aware, was the fear of being robbed. Behind every door he divined a possible thief; on every passer he scented a footpad; for as yet, in his uncertainty, he kept the pocketbook by him, sleeping on it at night, clutching it convulsively by day. But in Tompkins Square he felt easier; the idea of removing a plank occurred to him, and beneath his bed, in an oilskin wrapper, he placed the pocketbook. Another would have simplified everything by depositing the money in a bank, but Rufus Sisseton had grown timorous⁠—banks had been known to fail. Therewith was the haunting memory of that agonized face and the words of the dying⁠—“Give this, yourself.”

That “yourself” which the moribund had uttered the old clerk construed as constituting a sacred trust, and, to observe it as best he might, the advertisements continued. As time passed, and no reply came, his timorousness, instead of declining, increased. The eighty-seven thousand dollars submerged his faculties, he became the prey of fancies which banished both appetite and sleep; he kept to his room as much as possible, and finally so arranged that nothing could disturb his voluntary captivity. Nothing, indeed, except Jenny, who fluttered to him every year for awhile, and then took wing to the Massachusettsian school. When she had gone, he locked the door again and waited the coming of the Anderson heirs.

In this fashion seven years limped by, and Jenny, having received all the education which the school was competent to provide, returned definitely to her father. And it was as well, perhaps, that she did; for the latter, in his self-imposed seclusion, was becoming what Lombroso has recently christened a “mattoid”⁠—a crank on the road to an asylum. Such signs of aberration as he was beginning to manifest the girl’s blithesomeness and beauty banished. She filled the little apartment with laughter, with song, sunshine and life; her winsomeness and beguiling ways awoke and entranced the old man, and in considering her future and its possibilities, the hour came in which he caught himself thinking of the advantages which would accrue if no heir of Humphery Anderson should appear.

That idea once in his head, declined to be dislodged. It was only an hypothesis, it is true; but an hypothesis that became a hope, and in that hope, little by little, the form of his timidity altered; he ceased to fear that the heir might not appear; he began to fear that he would; and abruptly the advertisements ceased.

At the expiration of nine years the old clerk commenced to regard the money as his own. There were little surprises that he planned⁠—the purchase of a country home, trips with Jenny abroad. But the very first time that he counted the banknotes with the idea of appropriating a portion of them, they fell from his hand; he trembled from head to foot, and mentally he denounced himself as a thief. It may be that that same scrupulousness would forever have inhibited him from touching a penny of that trust, had he not discovered that Jenny was head over heels in love with a young artist to whom she had not addressed a single word. The discovery put an end to his hesitations. He made inquiries concerning Hugh, of which the result has been already conveyed; and, half in sorrow, half in joy, determined to give him Jenny, and the money, too.

It was these things that returned to him when the little man exclaimed:

“Well, sir, what am I to learn to my advantage?”

As he spoke, his eyes had the glitter of gems, and he tugged at his beard ferociously.

“I am Humphery Anderson’s next of kin, and in advertising for me I suppose it is because you had property of his in your possession.”

Mr. Sisseton hesitated. He thought of Jenny, of the happiness he had promised and of what must now ensue; but, to save the nation, he could not help being honest.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, dejectedly.

“Ha! ha!” laughed the little man. “I thought so. Well, fire ahead, I’m listening.”

“It is for you to go on, I think. What relation are you to Humphery Anderson?”

At this question the little man turned the color of brick; for a second he lowered his eyes, but immediately he recovered his customary aplomb.

“Thundering guns! why, I am his brother, his last surviving relative!”

“How is it, then, that for ten years you have given no sign of existence?”

“For the best reason in the world⁠—I have not been here. I have been in Mongolia, in Africa, in Peru; anywhere and everywhere except in the States. It is only six weeks ago that I landed. Even then I did not know of my brother’s death. I learned it only this moment.”

“How?”

“Through your advertisement, of course.”

“But I haven’t inserted one for over three years.”

“Then all I can say is that the paper in which I read it was over three years old and not very big for its age. But that is a side issue; how much did he leave?”

“Have you no idea?”

“H’m, let me see. My brother and I were owners of an Arizona claim. We sold out on the 15th of May, 1880. If he died on the 10th of June of that year he must have had somewhere between eighty and ninety thousand concealed on his person.”

“What became of you?”

“We parted at Tucson. I went to San Francisco, where I took ship for Hong Kong, without, of course, suspecting that Humphery was to turn in his chips in Boston.”

“Why do you speak of Boston?”

“It was there he intended to go.”

“Mr. Anderson, I must admit that your answers coincide with the papers in my possession. At the same time I must exact some tangible evidence of your identity.”

“Thundering guns!” the little man shouted, “so you shall. There,” he continued, drawing from his pocket a wallet similar to the one with which Mr. Sisseton had been entrusted. “Here is a Cuban passport, and here are two of Humphery’s letters. Do you know his writing?”

The old clerk glanced at the letters. They began “My dear Brother,” and were signed Humphery Anderson. The handwriting was identical with that on the memoranda. Incontestibly the heir had appeared.

“You have established your identity without a doubt,” he replied. “There remains to me now but one thing to do, and that is⁠—”

“To fork over.”

“To tell you how your brother died⁠—”

“What’s the use? I don’t care a rap. Whether it was paresis or the grip, what difference does it make? He’s dead, isn’t he? Well, that’s the end of it.”

“But,” protested Mr. Sisseton, a trifle scandalized at this manifestation of fraternal indifference. “I must explain how the money came in my possession.”

“All right, but cut it short.”

“He died in my arms,” said Mr. Sisseton, very gravely. “He was killed in a railway accident.”

“The deuce you say. Thundering guns! I thought you were going to tell me he was lynched. Though he was my brother, I am free to admit he was a confounded bad lot.”

“And now,” the old clerk continued, “I will give you what he entrusted to me.”

Therewith he handed out the roll of bills, which the heir carefully counted.

“Eighty-seven thousand!” he exclaimed. “In six months I’m a millionaire. As for you, I won’t insult you with any recompense, particularly as the interest would satisfy anyone.”

“The interest, sir? What do you mean by that? Those bills are the very same ones I received from your brother.”

“And you want me to believe that you kept them all this time in a cubbyhole! Stuff and nonsense!”

“Sir,” Mr. Sisseton, with great dignity, retorted, “Sir, you forget there was nothing to prevent me from keeping them always.”

“By George, that’s true enough! Here, help yourself.”

“I will take one of them, for you owe it me. It’s a trifle less than the amount I paid for advertising. But not another penny.”

“You won’t?”

“No, sir, not a cent.”

In unfeigned astonishment the little man stared at his brother’s executor.

“You are an honest man,” he cried; “no, but hang me if you are not. I won’t forget you. I am going now to take a hack at the Street before the Board closes; but I won’t forget you, mind that.”

Followed by Mr. Sisseton, he opened the door and passed into the other room. Near the window Hugh and Jenny stood locked in each other’s arms. The little man turned and smiled.

“Makes one feel twenty years younger, doesn’t it?”

Already the lovers had separated. Hugh was scowling and the girl’s fair face was wet with tears.

“Mr. Hyrtl,” the old clerk began, “didn’t I tell you that everything was at an end. Didn’t⁠—”

John Anderson, who had been tugging at his beard and grinning like a Cheshire cat, suddenly sprang back as though he trod on a serpent, his entire expression changed, and he grabbed Mr. Sisseton by the arm.

“What did you call that young man? Here,” he cried at Hugh, “is your name Hyrtl?”

“Certainly,” Hugh answered.

“Were you born near Richmond? Was your father a sailor? Was he lost at sea? Why don’t you answer? Thundering guns! are you dumb?”

“Not a bit; but I don’t understand your interest in my private affairs, nor yet your acquaintance with them. However, as I have no cause to make a mystery of my antecedents; I may say that I was born near Richmond, and that my father was lost at sea.”

“Torpedoes and dynamite! And whatever became of your mother? Did she⁠—didn’t she⁠—I mean⁠—I mean what became of her?”

“She is dead,” Hugh answered. “Did you know her?”

“I? I never saw her in my life.”

“Well, then, what do you mean by⁠—”

“What do I mean? What do I mean? I don’t know what I mean. I mean that in my travels I met a man named Hyrtl, and the name was so odd I never forgot it. That’s what I mean and nothing else, except that it’s infernally hot in here and I’m in a hurry.”

“No one is detaining you,” murmured Mr. Sisseton.

“I know that; but⁠—but⁠—see here, young man,” he continued, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills; “I have come into some money today that I didn’t expect, and, as you are going to be married, if three or four thousand are of any use to you, here they are.”

Hugh looked him from head to foot.

“Why do you make this offer?”

“Because I am your friend.”

“I have seen you but twice in my life.”

“Because I knew your father, then; because you did me a kindness; because⁠—because⁠—oh! hang it all, because I want to.”

“Thanks,” Hugh answered. “I am too poor to borrow and too proud to accept a gift. But I wish you would tell me why you spoke of my mother.”

“Will you take three or four thousand? Will you take five?”

“I will not.”

“Goodbye, then; I’m off to my broker.”

With a bound, the little man shot through the door and disappeared as he had come⁠—like the wind⁠—leaving behind him the ruins of a castle in Spain and three people buried beneath them.

Mr. Sisseton was ashen; Jenny pale as a ghost re-arisen; Hugh alone a trifle flushed.

“That man,” he declared, “knew my people, I am convinced.”

“Perhaps so,” Mr. Sisseton muttered; “he appears to have been a great traveler.”

Then at once, without preamble, he told the whole story. Hugh and Jenny listened without interruption. The preceding incidents had made it all quite clear, and when the tale was ended, there was silence in that little room.

Hugh was the first to speak.

“How shall it matter after all? You have returned the money; it was your duty to do so, no one expected you to do anything else, and I am sure you must be convinced that had Jenny and I been married, and the money in our possession, we would have returned it as you have done.”

“I am sure of it,” Mr. Sisseton answered. “I know you to be honest as the day, and I wish, even now, you could be, as I had hoped, my son-in-law.”

“But I shall be.”

“You won’t,” the old man answered, and in his withered face and sunken eyes there was the obstinacy of a mule. “What I have said I have said. Jenny shall not marry a poor man. Would you take her into that rathole of yours and watch privation, sickness, fever and death visit her one by one. No, sir, not while I am alive.”

“If that be the case,” Hugh in fine fury retorted, “what did you come into my rathole for at all?”

“Because Jenny was in love with you.”

“And do you suppose she is going to stop now?”

“I don’t know, but you shan’t have her. You are poor and so is she.”

“But if love and matrimony were only permitted to the rich the earth would crumble.”

“Let her crumble. You shan’t have my daughter. She is as like her mother as two peas. I won’t have her die of want. You shan’t have her, I say.”

“But consider the difference. You were a clerk in a grocery-shop. However hard you may have worked, you couldn’t earn a dollar more than your salary. Whereas I am a painter, and my brush will bring me both fortune and fame.”

“I hope it may, but by that time Jenny will be gray-headed. No, sir, you shan’t have her.”

“I shall.”

“You shall not.”

“Mr. Sisseton, remember this: you can’t help yourself. Your daughter is of age, the law prevents you from interfering.”

“It does, does it? Well, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The law makes this my castle, and I order you hence. Begone!”

“Mr. Sisseton⁠—”

“Begone, I say!”

“Very good, sir, I will go since you command it, but I will return with a summons. Jenny, my love, my chosen, but not mine, be brave.”

And therewith this hotheaded young fellow, his head erect, stalked from the room.

VI

In high indignation at the old man’s mulish obstinacy Hugh strode out into the street and on and beyond into other regions of the city. He was vastly annoyed, and his annoyance was increased by the fact that he had permitted it to be apparent. He should have been calm, he told himself, calm, though authoritative, and he should have displayed, with cogent reasonings, the folly of supposing that at the tail-end of the nineteenth century a young woman could be sequestrated and kept apart from her lover. It was that he should have made manifest, and with it his ability to provide not only for Jenny, but for her father, her grandfather⁠—for as many Sissetons as could be produced. And instead of that, instead of showing the slightest tact, the merest spark of common sense, he had threatened the old man with a summons and made him an enemy for life. There was now but one course left for him to pursue: to apologize as abjectly as he knew how, and that failing, to elope with Jenny on the spot. That she would go with him he did not doubt for an instant, and already he saw himself, another Lochinvar, bearing off the girl of his heart in a green car to the nearest parsonage available.

In dreams forecast he turned and retraced his steps. He would have it out with the old man at once, he determined; and on reaching Tompkins Square he marched straight upstairs and knocked, gently and deferentially at the Sisseton door. Save the beating of his own heart there was not a sound to be heard. He knocked again, a trifle more resolutely, yet still there was no reply. He peered through the keyhole. Not a glimmer of light was to be seen.

“It is I,” he called⁠—“Hugh Hyrtl. Won’t you let me in, Mr. Sisseton? I am sorry for the way I spoke.”

But there was no answer to his appeal. Again he knocked, loudly, boisterously, calling to Jenny, calling to her father and calling in vain. From the floor below a voice mounted bidding him cease that racket. He tried the door; it was locked.

“You must let me in,” he insisted. “I shall stay here until you do.”

Again the protest mounted, with it the fall of a step that he knew, and Mrs. O’Hassadam, a broom in one hand, a candle in the other suddenly appeared.

“My! my!” that lady exclaimed, “if I didn’t think it was the police. They’re after him anyway, and good riddance it is.”

“After whom?”

“The ex-convict, to be sure; who would they be after? He was off like that! But they’re on his track, he can’t have got far at all whatever, he and his blooming daughter. It was wrong you were, Mr. Hyrtl, to consort with the likes of them.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“What do I mean, Mr. Hyrtl? Indeed, and I mean what I say. An hour ago that old forger came downstairs dragging a trunk and his daughter after him. ‘I am going on a trip,’ said he, handing me his key. ‘To Sing Sing, I’ll wager,’ said I to myself. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ he continued. ‘Come, Jenny’; and, would you believe that though she was crying her eyes out, she tried to say something to me on the quiet like? But he grabbed her and whisked her off. At the rate he went it will take the cavalry to catch him. It’s a murder case, sure, Mr. Hyrtl, and a fine reputation whatever it will give to this house.”

“Gone,” Hugh murmured, dejectedly, “it can’t be possible.”

“Here is the key,” cried the janitress, triumphantly. “And if you were to unlock that door the Lord deliver us from the horrors you would find.”

With that statement for prelude, Mrs. O’Hassadam launched forth into voluble digressions and extravagant conjectures; but Hugh was not to be detained, he had no heart to listen further, and dumbly perplexed, he turned and sought his room.

For a fortnight thereafter Hugh ransacked the city, wandering like a lost dog through mazes of streets, interrogating windows, questioning lodging-house keepers, always on the alert and always disappointed. At the end of that period he learned that a secondhand furniture dealer had come, exhibited a bill of sale and carted off the Sisseton belongings. Where to? Ah! that Mrs. O’Hassadam did not know, but she took evident pleasure in losing herself in the wildest surmises.

Thereupon the Odyssey recommenced. The appalling ugliness of the suburbs, the terrors of Long Island, New Jersey wastes, one and all were visited and visited in vain. He had not a clue to work on and not a trace of the missing was to be had. Presently fatigue and disappointment had their way; a low fever overtook him and for a month he lay in bed. Mrs. O’Hassadam had a physician in for him, but Hugh was strong and young, and in spite of the physician the fever departed and the convalescent, very feeble but with clearer mind, rose to his feet. If Jenny had cared for him, he decided, at least she would have sent him a line.

Thereat he got at his easel again and painted with a grim energy which he had never displayed before. Work has the ability to dull the most ardent sorrow, and in that which Hugh undertook, though happiness had fallen by the wayside, art stood revealed. Moreover, chanced favored him. Being indifferent to both fame and fortune, he was necessarily the person whom fame and fortune elected to pursue. A dealer who heretofore had purchased his wares at prices that would have made a mad-dog blush, suddenly increased them. Not only that, he admitted that Hugh’s signature was beginning to acquire an appreciable commercial value, and as a commission for someone whose name he was not at liberty to mention, he took “Heliogabalus” in exchange for two thousand dollars in cash.

Hugh paid the debts he had contracted during his illness and set to work harder than before. He could have taken a studio now in a pleasanter part of the city, or he could have set off on that tour through the ghosts and treasures of Italy of which every artist dreams. But invisible threads detained him, and he remained where he was, consuming his heart with regrets and his strength with fatigue.

Summer passed, the Autumn came, and with it an unstillable longing to get away⁠—to be somewhere where there was youth and companionship, where there were smiles and flowers, the welcome of eyes and fields. His solitude was distressing to him. Week in, week out there was not a soul with whom he could exchange a word. He had not a friend, not a relative even, and his sweetheart he had lost. Wherever he looked was the desert, and in his heart was a blank despair. Had his mother been living, how quickly he would have gone to her. But she was dead, and he could no longer run to her side, as had been his wont, with the troubles of childhood’s years. He was alone, without a tie, a hope or an aim.

At the thought of his mother he recalled the hour when his dearest wish had been to erect a monument on her grave. He had money in plenty to do so now. Though he were forsaken by the living, why should he forsake the dead? The next day he arrived at Richmond, and by evening he was before the cottage which he loved.

Apparently nothing had happened to it. It had contented itself with continuing to be, and in the increasing darkness rose white and solitary as before. Hugh unlocked the door and entered. The shutters, he noticed, had disappeared, the broken windows were curtained with cobwebs, there was an odor and silence of the tomb, but practically it had weathered the years unchanged. Noiselessly, as though in fear of disturbing phantoms, he passed through the little hall to the kitchen beyond. It was chill and damp, but through the window the spire of the village church was just discernible, and nearby was a grave that he knew. For a minute, an hour perhaps, he loitered there, the guest of memories that came one by one and claimed him as their own⁠—the sport he had had with Dinah and his mother’s tender care; episodes long forgotten returned to him, but in that curious fashion that episodes will at times assume, as though they had occurred not to him, but to some Hugh Hyrtl who had existed in an anterior life, one in which he personally had had no part and of which only a hearsay recollection endured. There, for instance, was his mother’s sudden illness and unexpected death. Try as he might, he could not reconstruct that scene. In the dimmest manner only he recalled that one day a cry was said to have rung through the cottage and that Dinah had found his mother fainting on the floor. But what had happened he had never known. The cause was obscure.

From these meditations a gust of wind aroused him. He shivered and turned. In a corner were a few pieces of wood, and with some stray papers in his pocket he determined to make a fire. But the task was not easy; a mass of ashes that for years had rested undisturbed filled the stove. In endeavoring to remove them, he struck a hard object, which, on examination, proved to be a key, curiously formed, long and narrow, that he could have sworn he had seen before. But where? In that anterior existence, perhaps, from which certain recollections come; and he was about to put it aside and continue his work, when abruptly, from the very core of memory, a picture floated⁠—his mother standing at a table locking and unlocking a certain box. That box, he remembered, always stood on a shelf in her room; and at last, the ashes removed, he groped up the creaking stair to see if the box might be there still. The match he held went out. He lighted another and opened the door. On the shelf the box stood covered with immemorial dust. He raised it; it was so light he was sure there was nothing in it. Nevertheless he took it back to the kitchen and inserted and turned the key. Within, a letter lay, discolored and yellow. By the uncertain flicker of the fire, Hugh read from it as follows:

Tucson, Arizona, 15th May, 1880.

Madam⁠—Although I am a stranger to you, I believe it to be my duty to place you in possession of certain information which otherwise you might never obtain.

Nine years ago it was reported that your husband, Humphery Hyrtl, was lost at sea. That report was false. When the ship which he commanded sank, I was with him. Of all on board he and I alone escaped. We were picked up by a passing vessel and taken to South America. On the boat he declared that he was my brother, and, on reaching Rio, caused it to be recorded at the United States Consulate that Humphery Hyrtl and his ship were lost. It did not take me long to discover that he had left in Virginia a wife and child, to whom, for reasons of his own, he did not wish to return. I became so indignant at his conduct that he finally promised to go back to you as soon as he had made enough to live on. Since then we have worked together, sometimes lucky, often the reverse. Today our partnership is dissolved. His share amounts to ninety thousand dollars, and with it he should return to you; but, as he has told me to address his letters to Boston, I presume that it is his intention to dissipate the money which should rightfully go to your support and that of your son.”

I inform you of these facts in order that you may take such steps as seem advisable. He is to leave here tomorrow, and after making a short stop in St. Louis and in Chicago, should be in your neighborhood sometime during the first or second week of the coming month. If he does not appear, you will, by making inquiries concerning him, under his assumed name of Humphery Anderson, surely find him in Boston.

When Hugh had read the letter, for the first time he understood the cause of his mother’s death. The knowledge that the man whom she had loved and mourned was not only alive, but preferred life under an assumed name to life with her, had broken her heart. Truly, he reflected, it was sufficient: the cup was full. And as he mused over the terrible tidings that the letter contained, he saw at once that it was his father who had been killed in the collision, that the money which had been entrusted to Sisseton was the money to which the letter referred; the remarkable chain of circumstances which had permitted John Anderson to represent himself as the brother of the deceased were clear to him and the unaccountable excitement which the little man had manifested when the name of Hyrtl was pronounced easily understood.

“The money was mine,” muttered Hugh. “He knew it, and, by heavens, I will make him disgorge!”

He passed out through the empty hall to the road beyond.

“Ah, Jenny,” he cried, to the stars, “let me but find you now and you shall be rich, indeed!”

VII

A day or two later, when Hugh awoke in his room in Tompkins Square it was with that sense of satisfaction which comes to a man who has done his duty. He had left orders in Richmond that a suitable monument be placed on his mother’s grave, and he had contracted to have the cottage refurnished and rebuilt, for it was there the coming honeymoon was to be passed.

The party essential to the proper passing of that honeymoon was indeed intangible and remote, but what difficulties shall impede a lover armed with courage and mailed in hope? He had absolutely nothing at all to do but to unearth John Anderson, and that accomplished, to find Jenny, and behold!⁠—happiness, lifelong and uninterruptable, would crouch, a spaniel, at his feet.

The unearthing of such a person as John Anderson seemed to Hugh the easiest thing in the world. In the Stock Exchange and its purlieus an individual of such marked peculiarities must by this time have become well known. With Jenny it was different; but though that ruffian of a father of hers had hid her in the depths of a Japanese jungle or immured her behind convent walls, he would find and recover her yet. She should be his; she had promised it, and what shall separate those that love?

These anticipations were interrupted by a rap at the door. At the moment Hugh, in preparation of a visit to Wall Street, was meditatively brushing his hat, but at the rap he put the hat down and went to the door and opened it. There in the corridor’s dim penumbra was John Anderson in person.

Speechless with astonishment, Hugh started back.

“You!”

“Yes, dear boy,” the little man answered. “Whom did you expect? May I come in?”

With that he seized Hugh’s unresisting hand, and entering the room, straddled a chair.

“You’re well, I hope. So much the better. Thundering guns! but I am delighted to hear it.”

“How kind of you!”

“But I am delighted,” the little man insisted, for there was an irony in Hugh’s voice that would hardly have escaped a deaf-mute. “I am delighted, I assure you. Between ourselves, I was a trifle uneasy this morning when I set out for Tompkins Square.”

“And why so?”

“In the first place, because I have neglected you; it must be four months since I was here. Then, too, I have something on my conscience.”

“Ah?”

“Yes, my conscience may be elastic, but it is not gangrened. Hugh, dear boy, I haven’t acted right; no, thundering guns! I’ll be hanged if I have.”

Hugh nodded encouragingly. If he is going to own up, he reflected, I haven’t the heart to be angry.

“Go on,” he said, gently.

The little man pulled at his beard and tormented an ear.

“It’s hard work; if I had my choice I’d rather run for election, I give you my word I would.”

“Don’t, then.” And Hugh smiled benignly. “I know all.”

The little man jumped from his seat.

“Thundering guns!”

“It is about my eighty-seven thousand dollars, isn’t it?”

“ ‘Your’ eighty-seven⁠—Fire and brimstone! You do know all. But how? Who on earth could have told you a thing that no one knew about save myself.”

“It was the one person who knew that told. It was you, Mr. Anderson, that told me. It was you yourself.”

“Torpedoes and dynamite! You’re a mind-reader, chiromancer and telepathist rolled into one.”

“No, nothing of that sort. Look at this.”

And Hugh displayed the letter which he had found in his Virginia home. The little man glanced at it and blushed.

“But four months ago, when I took that money⁠—”

“My money.”

“Yes, your money, I admit. When I took it I can swear you hadn’t seen this letter then.”

“No, I had not,” Hugh answered, and thereupon related the circumstances connected with the finding of the key.

“This is fatality,” said the little man, with a solemn air. “In the long run everything comes out. And to think what a figure I should have cut if I had not been the first to speak!”

“There! It is not the money I regretted the most.”

“I know⁠—I know, and that’s the worst of it. I made inquiries and learned what happened. If it were not for me you would have been married long since.”

“Oh, as to that,” said Hugh, gayly, “everything will go right enough now.”

“What a philosopher you are!” the little man, in manifest surprise, exclaimed. “A fellow annexes your property, prevents your marriage, and, instead of sand bagging him, you treat him as pleasantly as though he had done you a favor.”

At this speech Hugh laughed triumphantly. “I can promise you,” he said, “that if this morning I had run across you unexpectedly I might have taken the law into my own hands. But since of your own free will you come to make restitution. I⁠—”

“Restitution! Thundering guns! we don’t understand each other at all.”

“We don’t?” cried Hugh, whom the wantonness of this reply had roused to sudden fury; “we don’t, eh? And do you mean to tell me⁠—”

“Mean? I mean nothing. Thundering guns! haven’t you taken a look at me yet? Have I the air of a man who has come to restore eighty-seven thousand dollars, let alone ten cents? Why I haven’t a penny in the world. Look at these rags, look at my shoes; did you ever see such shoes? As for my shirt⁠—”

The little man opened his tattered coat. His breast was bare.

Hugh sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. The blow was too cruel.

“I don’t know,” the little man continued, when he saw that the pantomime had had its effect. “I don’t know how it all happened. For everyone this has been a bad year. It began on Friday, do you remember? and what it would have been if it begun on a thirteenth God only knows, and when I say God only I exaggerate. I started by making loads of money; I had enough to burn⁠—it was a nuisance to me. Thundering guns! how I did bellow with the bulls, and suddenly it was the bears that caught me. Everything went, everything, everything. They didn’t even leave me my shirt.”

“My poor Jenny,” moaned Hugh. “My poor, dear Jenny.”

“Yes, indeed,” muttered the little man, with a vicious tug at his beard. “It’s that I should have foreseen. With the money I annexed you could have been happy and prosperous and made yourself a name, whereas now, oh, hang it all! it’s too tough. Why was I ever born? Why don’t you kick me? Why don’t you shoot me? Why don’t you send for the police?”

Hugh raised his eyes; there was a pathos in them, a sorrow for his lost love so great, so manifest, so abiding that John Anderson lowered his own.

“See here,” he added, after a moment, “see here; there’s no use taking on like that. I am down on my luck today, I admit, but tomorrow! Why, you have no idea of the inscrutable possibilities that the future contains. I’ll be on my feet again, I’ll be a millionaire yet. We’ll all be millionaires. Say the word and I’ll draw you a note, at sixty days, for a hundred thousand dollars.”

“It is enough that you have robbed me,” gnashed Hugh, re-overtaken by fury. “There is no need to insult me as well.”

“Insult you!” protested the little man. “Insult you, dear boy! Why I give you my word of honor⁠—”

“Honor!” cried Hugh, a phrase from Dickens returning to him. “Honor, indeed! Bah! Give me something to take the taste out of my mouth.”

“I’ll swear by what you like, then,” the little man, in no wise disconcerted, replied. “I’ll swear that my dearest wish is to see you famous and happy.”

“And you have gone about it the right way, haven’t you?”

“No, you are right there, I haven’t. But just consider the circumstances. Before I knew of your existence the banknotes were in my pocket. Besides, if it hadn’t been for me your father never would have had them; as it was they kept crying to me⁠—‘Carry us off, double us, triple us, quintuple us, repay later, but carry us off now.’ That’s what they kept crying to me, and, thundering guns! I was weak enough to obey. But as I said before, send for the police. State’s prison is too good for me; I ought to be hanged and have my ghost kicked.”

Hugh gave him a look that enveloped him from head to heel.

“I have but one request to make,” he said, measuredly; “and that is that you will go.”

At this, the little man got up and hobbled to the door. There, for a moment, he halted and tormented his beard; then, looking over his shoulder at Hugh, who had turned to the window where he had caught the first glimpse of Jenny’s face, he coughed. Hugh affected not to hear him.

“Mr. Hyrtl!”

Hugh still kept his back turned. The little man made a step toward him.

“Mr. Hyrtl, before I go let me tell you this; it may be a consolation to you. I am in more desperate straits than the day I met you. I had hope then; I have none left now. I am starving, and, as I cannot beg, I am going to throw myself into the river. Goodbye.”

Hugh fumbled in his pocket, and, turning from the window, crossed the room. “Here, take that,” he said. “I give it to you because of the one good action of your life⁠—in memory of my mother, whom you tried to aid.”

With that, he went back to the window, and the little man, his eyes very red and wet, opened the door and disappeared.

VIII

The day passed somehow, the morrow as well; a week took flight, during which Hugh sat in his room, inert and listless, issuing, like a wolf from his den, only when hunger compelled.

On such occasions hunger seemed to vanish when food appeared; he had appetite for nothing; he had lost even zest in life. Another might have betaken himself to the caresses of that yellow fay who lurks in certain bottles; but to Hugh even that palliative was denied; he could not drink; it may be that he was too refined.

He could not work, either; he could not read. With that immobility noticeable in certain forms of dementia, he gazed at the untenanted window opposite hour after hour, until night loosed her draperies and the window was hid. At such times his mind was empty⁠—inhabited, if at all, by spectral shadows, the phantoms of regret. Among our friends and acquaintances are always those who, to our knowledge, have sorrows of their own. But there are others that evolve a world, one that glows, subsides and dies away, unknown to any save themselves. The solitudes of space appall, the solitudes of the heart can be as endless as they. In those which Hugh concealed a universe had had its being and its subsistence⁠—a universe with gem-like hopes for stars, one in which the sun had been so eager it had cast its rainbows in his eyes. But now it was all dispersed; there was nothing left⁠—a desire merely, which, dumb at first, little by little had become articulate⁠—a longing for the grave. Like many another young man who has suddenly found himself balked, Hugh had determined to take his life.

It was preoccupations of this description that a visitor one day interrupted. Hugh had not heard anyone enter, and was made aware of another’s presence only by the sound of his own name. He started with that spring a cat gives when suddenly aroused. Before him stood the picture-dealer who had taken Heliogabalus away. He was a man of noticeable gentility, a man with an acquired smile, a brilliant hat, fabulous trousers and a pea-green stick. At the moment he was diligently smoking a huge cigar.

“Nothing new, eh?” he inquired, with a glance at the empty easel.

Hugh shook his head.

“I have a commission for you,” he continued. “What’s the matter? You look out of sorts.”

To this Hugh made no reply.

“There’s a gentleman who has purchased an elegant house in Irving place; and he wants a high-toned artist to decorate it⁠—he wants it done in first-rate style, and damn the expense. I told him of you, and he says you are to begin at once. His name is⁠—h’m, what is his name? Thurlire, or something like that. However, I’ve got it written down. What do you say?”

“I say he can go to the devil.”

In amazement at this rebuff the dealer dropped the ashes from his cigar all over himself and flushed mightily.

“If that’s the message you expect one gentleman to take to another gentleman I guess you may⁠—”

What in circumstances of that nature he thought Hugh might do will never be known to history. In a rich rustle of vocables and skirt, Mrs. O’Hassadam appeared at the open door, a letter in her hand, which, she announced, with much emphasis and a look of unmollifiable suspicion at the dealer, was for Mr. Hyrtl and for no one else whatever.

Hugh grasped the letter as the man in the legend grasped the straw. It was from Jenny, he was sure. But the handwriting was not of a maidenly description. It was in the bold, free hand of a clerk, and it intimated very tersely that the writer would be obliged for a check in payment of the monument which he had erected on Mrs. Hyrtl’s grave.

“And I haven’t a dollar,” mused Hugh. “One thing is certain: I can’t kill myself until that debt is paid.”

“Is that your answer?” asked the dealer, savagely.

Hugh blinked with the tremor of a somnambulist awaking from a trance. He had been so far away that he had forgot everything, even to the dealer’s presence.

“My answer? My answer to what? Oh, yes, about your friend’s house. Very good, I’ll do it.”

“Now that’s the talk I like. When will you begin? Today? Good enough. Here’s the name and address. Do it up elegant, won’t you? So long.” And with that the dealer took his cigar and pea-green stick away.

Two hours later Hugh was at the house in Irving place. A manservant opened the door, and on learning Hugh’s mission, laughed riotously.

“It’s a good one, isn’t it?” he roared.

And as Hugh only stared, dumbly perplexed, the servant suddenly subsided, and murmured, sepulchrally:

“I beg pardon, sir; I thought as how you were in it!”

“In what, you confounded idiot? Hang your impudence, what do you mean by laughing in my face? If you don’t know your place, your master shall teach you. Where is he?”

The muscles of the man’s face twitched, but he controlled the coming grin by a tight pressure of the lips.

“I beg pardon, sir,” he answered. “He isn’t here yet. I thought you knew he is to be married. If you will step this way, sir.” And fearing perhaps to explode, he drew a portiere aside and Hugh passed into the drawing room.

It was large, high ceiled and furnished in very fair taste. Beyond, another room extended, before which curtains fell. The air was sweet with flowers, and presently, though dusk was approaching, and the light, as is usual in old New York houses, was not plentiful, Hugh perceived that he was not alone. The curtains had parted, and a lady was entering the room. She took a step or two in Hugh’s direction, apparently unconscious of his presence, and then, with a little bleat of surprise, she ran to where he stood.

“Hugh!”

The young man tottered like a drunkard.

“You, Jenny!” he exclaimed, in fine fervor. “Tell me I am not dreaming; tell me it is you.”

His answer was two arms thrown about his neck, two lips on his own, the murmur and gurgle of love and joy.

“Here! here! You’ve no right to do that.”

The curtains had parted again, and on the threshold of the room beyond an old man stood, very cross and disagreeable.

“Stop it, I say!”

And Hugh, more intoxicated than if he had drunk a dozen pints of champagne, looked from Jenny’s blue and sultry eyes into the glowering face of her father.

“Ah! I understand,” he exclaimed⁠—“I understand all now. Thank you, dear Mr. Sisseton; thank you a million times.”

“You!” shrieked the old man. “You! What in the name of a wilderness of gorillas are you doing here?”

“Embracing your daughter.”

“Your conduct is infamous, sir. You lure me here by trick and pretense, and insult me to my face. Stand back, I say.”

“I lure you here? I? Why I didn’t know where you were. I would have given twenty years of my life to find you.”

“Oh, oh!” pouted Jenny. “What about my letters?”

“Letters? I haven’t had one,” answered Hugh, in a crescendo of bewilderment.

“I sent you a dozen at least, and you never took the trouble to answer one of them.”

“Twenty,” snapped the old man. “I have them all in my pocket.”

“Papa, papa!” sobbed the girl, “how could you be so cruel.”

“It must be evident to you,” said Hugh, persuasively, “it must be quite evident to you now, my dear Mr. Sisseton, that I was not the means of bringing you here.”

“Well, then, what in thunder did you come for?”

“Simply to fresco the walls.”

“As I did,” interjected Jenny, “in the hope of securing a position as typewriter.”

“What luck!” the old man growled.

“Luck!” Hugh cried, “It’s the hand of Providence that has led me to you, my dear, dear friend.”

“I forbid you to so address me, sir,” the old man fairly yelped. “You are insane, that’s what you are.”

“Haven’t I had enough to make me?”

“Tell me this, sir⁠—do you still love my daughter?”

“With all my heart.”

“Will you agree not to ask her to marry you?”

“Never in the world.”

“In that case everything between us is at an end. Go to the devil.”

“But⁠—”

“You shan’t have my daughter, that’s flat.”

“But⁠—”

“You shan’t have my daughter⁠—you shan’t have my daughter⁠—you shan’t have my daughter⁠—”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Hugh, with a great show of bluster. “Your daughter is of age and I’ll appeal to the law.”

“You will, will you? It seems to me you said that before. Come, Jenny, we must go at once.”

“Not yet,” called a shrill voice, and suddenly the room was inundated and entered by the glitter of electric lights, and an individual, superbly tailored and groomed, advanced majestically, his fingers in his waistcoat.

“What are you people quarreling about?” he inquired, haughtily. “Don’t you know how to behave? Thundering guns!”

And to the astonishment of those present John Anderson wheeled an armchair before the fire and began the delicate operation of toasting the veneered soles of a pair of patent-leather shoes.

“Draw up,” he said, “these October dusks are chill. Bring a chair for Miss Sisseton, Hugh; bring a chair for yourself.”

In his manner there was an ease, a serenity and self-sufficiency that was simply diabolic. Hugh stared like an oaf at a mountebank, and Mr. Sisseton, gaping with surprise, stood, his crumbling jaws half-parted.

John Anderson looked from one to the other and smiled at Jenny.

“That lover of yours doesn’t appear very grateful to a man who, in spite of wind and weather, has brought him to your side, does he, Miss Sisseton?”

“You don’t mean⁠—” Hugh began and then hesitated, as though he were talking in a dream.

“Yes, I do,” John Anderson answered, encouragingly. “That’s precisely what I do mean.”

“In that case I forgive you.”

“You do, do you? Thundering guns! are we quits on those eighty-seven thousand dollars?”

“Yes,” said Hugh, with an entire absence of heartiness. “Yes, we are, although⁠—”

“Although they would do you a jolly good service just at present, wouldn’t they? And you, Miss Sisseton,” he continued, turning to that young woman, who had approached the fire, her blue eyes filled with wonderment, “won’t you reward an old man, too?”

“Willingly,” she lisped, as she lowered the purity of her brow, “but the most grateful girl in the world⁠—”

“Only offers what she can spare, and I am satisfied with it,” said the old ruffian between two kisses. “Thank you, my little beauty, I feel twenty years younger.”

“Here, here! You’ve no right to do that,” interposed Mr. Sisseton. “Stop it, I say!”

“Where did you get that jag?” John Anderson, in a tone of great interest, inquired. “Now, see here, pard; you, like myself, are a guest in this house, and it is very bad form of you to kick up a rumpus, dreadful bad form. I am surprised at you⁠—”

“Stuff and nonsense!” growled the father.

“Yes, I am⁠—I am surprised at you. A man of your age, too! But thundering guns! what’s that?”

And John Anderson leaned over and peered into the grate.

“Why, it’s a key,” Jenny exclaimed; “here let me get it.”

But Hugh was already at work, and in a moment he had extracted a key not at all dissimilar to one which he had seen before.

“What in the world was it doing there, I wonder?” John Anderson, with a superb assumption of surprise, remarked. “Why, it looks as though it might belong to that box on the table, there. Hugh, suppose you try and see. That box, Hugh, must be like the one from which you disinterred the one good action of my life, isn’t it?”

Hugh nodded. The key fitted perfectly. The box opened without a creak.

“Look and see what’s in it, Miss Sisseton,” the little man continued. “Look and see. A key that falls down the chimney merits attention; it may have been your good fairy that let it fall. Look and see.”

“Here! here!” growled Jenny’s father. “You have no right to do that. What would Mr.⁠—Mr. Whatever-his-name-is say if he saw you?”

“He would say she was doing quite right, partner. Rummage away, Miss Sisseton; rummage away.”

Thus encouraged, Jenny drew out a sheaf of bills.

“Banknotes!” she cried.

“There are eighty-seven of them,” said the little man. “Partner, they are the ones you were to give to your daughter, and, as no better use can be put to them, Mr. Thughlyrh returns them to you. Take them.”

“Take them?” Mr. Sisseton repeated, drawing himself up to his full height. “But what right do you⁠—”

“Take them, I keep telling you; and you, Miss Sisseton, rummage away.”

“Diamonds and pearls!” the girl murmured, in ecstasy.

The little man hummed contentedly:

“ ‘Du hast Diamanten und Perlen,
Du hast⁠—tra la la, tra la laire,
Du ha⁠—hast die schönsten Augen,
Mein Liebling, was willst du noch mehr?’

Go on” he continued, “go on. Those diamonds and pearls are Mr. Thughlyrh’s wedding present to his bride.”

“But tell me, you shall tell me,” barked Mr. Sisseton, the perspiration streaming in the hollows of his cheek, “who is Mr. Thughlyrh? Is he⁠—you, or is he the devil?”

“Neither. Do you wish to see him?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Well, then, the young and attractive Mr. Thughlyrh, who is to marry a beauty; the rich Mr. Thughlyrh, whose guests we are, is⁠—”

“Who?” cried Jenny, while her lover pricked up his ears.

“⁠—Is Hugh Hyrtl.”

“I!”

“Why, of course; I thought you had guessed it before. Thughlyrh is the anagram of your name, and, thundering guns! a hard one it was to make.”

“But the house?” said Hugh, beside himself with excitement.

“Rummage in the box, Miss Sisseton.”

In the box was a brief deed in Hugh’s name⁠—signed, sealed and attested.

“It’s too much,” cried the young fellow, “I can’t accept it.”

John Anderson raised his hand, his face had become grave and serious.

“Dear boy,” he said, “let me, according to my lights, make amends for the past. No doubt I should have have done so sooner, but if I prolonged your sorrow, if I masqueraded in rags in your room, if I pretended to be more indigent than before, it was because I had not yet discovered Miss Sisseton. I wanted to restore her to you when I restored your money. From that test you issued as an angel might. Anyone else would have killed me; you gave me alms. Be generous to the end, Hugh. Don’t refuse what I am well able to give. Don’t leave me to my remorse.”

“So be it,” Hugh answered. “I accept the house on condition I may return it the next time you go broke.”

“Don’t count on that. I am forever cured of speculation. Hereafter I shall live on my income, and play whist with my partner here.”

“But for the love of heaven,” the old clerk implored, “tell me what all this means.”

“It means,” said the little man, rising as he spoke from his seat. “It means that I have encountered two things that I have never encountered before.”

“What are they?”

“Charity and forgiveness,” John Anderson answered, taking Hugh by one hand; “and absolute honesty,” he continued, stretching the other to Jenny’s papa.

“And now, dear lady and sweet sirs,” he added, with a large, old-fashioned bow, “do me the favor to step into the other room; a little feast has been prepared, the feast of betrothal, and from the wall where he laughs and lounges let Heliogabalus shower as many flowers as he may. There, do you hear the corks popping? Thundering guns! I shall drink deep tonight.”