eft the restaurant.

It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again--or rather when
Dickie was again seen by him. This time Dickie was not in the restaurant.
He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he
was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held
down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of
brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a
sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the
desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared
at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue
serge coat.

"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.

Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more
slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the
observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the
face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling
and reserved manhood.

"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well--yes--not always."

"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put
on his glasses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you
copying it for?--letter to your girl?"

Dickie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt
drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer
slightly, it was an honest answer.

"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."

"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"

Dickie colored. "Well, sir, I don't rightly understand the workings of
this place. I come by it on the way home and I kep' a-seein' folks goin'
in with books and comin' out with books. I figured it was a kind of
exchange proposition. I've only got one book--and that ain't rightly
mine--" the man looking at him wondered why his face flamed--"so, when I
came in, I just watched and I figured you could read here if you had the
notion to take down a book and fetch it over to the table and copy from
it and return it. So I've been doin' that."

"Why didn't you go to the desk, youngster, and ask questions?"

"Where I come from"--Dickie was drawling again--"folks don't deal so much
in questions as they do here."

"Where you came from! You came from Mars! Come along to the desk and
I'll fix you up with a card and you can take an armful of poetry