Come; first through the
breach, Timothy! 'T is your right. Now we are through--catch stride here
in fortune's highway. You are on duty with Dan Regan!"

This queer sentimental thing the man does in honor of his mother's
messenger, and never again through all the years is the spell broken
which draws the man of pull-down and trample-under away and upward to
the things which the pretty colleen of long agone saw beyond the day's
work at Turntable. 'T is little we know.

MRS. DRAINGER'S VEIL[17]

[Note 17: Copyright, 1918, by Smart Set Company, Inc. Copyright,
1920, by Howard Mumford Jones.]

BY HOWARD MUMFORD JONES

From _The Smart Set_

If the house had been merely shabby I doubt whether I would have been
interested. Every residence section has its shabby houses, monuments to
departed aspirations, falling into slow decay in the midst of weedy
yards, sometimes uninhabited and sometimes sheltering one or two members
of the family who apparently have been left, like the ancient furniture,
to be forgotten. The paint cracks and peels, the windows fall into
impossible angles or are boarded up, the porches sag, the chimneys lose
a brick or two and come in time to look like stumps of teeth. By and by
the whole structure seems to sink into the grass under the burden of its
neglect, and only a faint tenacity, a melancholy inertia keeps it from
crumbling altogether. Then suddenly the inhabitants die, the neighbors
awake to a sudden sense of change, and that is all.

The Drainger house was such a house, but it was more. It was mysterious,
uncommunicative. In the midst of the commonplace residence block, with
its white cottages, its monotonous lawns and uninteresting gardens, the
contrast was startling, secretive, contemptuous. The tall grass waved
ironically at the neat grassplots which flanked it. The great untrimmed
elms sent branches to beat against the decaying shingles, or downward
into the faces of passers-by, with patrician indifference to the law.
They had, indeed, the air of ragged retainers, haughty and starving, and
yet crowding about the house as if to hide the poverty of their master
from the eyes of the vulgar. City ordinances required the laying of
cement walks; the rotting boardwalk in front of the Drainger mansion
was already treacherous, and no one complained.

The building itself was extraordinary. Built in the days when Crosby had
been a lumber town and building material had consequently been che