-Hello, I must run. I'll
send back the money as fast as they pay me--so, good-bye and God bless
you, Georgie!"

He passed through the gates, waved his hat cheerily from the other side
of the iron screen, and was lost from sight in the hurrying crowd.
And as he disappeared, an unexpected poignant loneliness fell upon his
nephew so heavily and so suddenly that he had no energy to recoil from
the shock. It seemed to him that the last fragment of his familiar world
had disappeared, leaving him all alone forever.

He walked homeward slowly through what appeared to be the strange
streets of a strange city; and, as a matter of fact, the city was
strange to him. He had seen little of it during his years in college,
and then had followed the long absence and his tragic return. Since that
he had been "scarcely outdoors at all," as Fanny complained, warning him
that his health would suffer, and he had been downtown only in a closed
carriage. He had not realized the great change.

The streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal
coating of dinginess. George walked through the begrimed crowds of
hurrying strangers and saw no face that he remembered. Great numbers
of the faces were even of a kind he did not remember ever to have seen;
they were partly like the old type that his boyhood knew, and partly
like types he knew abroad. He saw German eyes with American wrinkles at
their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes,
Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes,
Scandinavian eyes--all with a queer American look in them. He saw Jews
who had been German Jews, Jews who had been Russian Jews, Jews who had
been Polish Jews but were no longer German or Russian or Polish Jews.
All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried,
under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly
all seemed harried by something impending, though here and there a women
with bundles would be laughing to a companion about some adventure of
the department stores, or perhaps an escape from the charging traffic
of the streets--and not infrequently a girl, or a free-and-easy young
matron, found time to throw an encouraging look to George.

He took no note of these, and, leaving the crowded sidewalks, turned
north into National Avenue, and presently reached the quieter but no
less begrimed region of smaller shops and old-fashioned houses. Those
latter had