141
X. THE MOTHER-BIRD 151
XI. THE AMIGO 161
XII. BLACK CROSS FARM 173
XIII. THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE 185
XIV. A FEAST OF REASON 227
XV. CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL 243
XVI. TABLE TALK 253
XVII. THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER 269
XVIII. SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY 285
XIX. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS 319

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE

I

They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar
room, with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and
decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought
the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.

They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
departing household stuff.

When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
office