rested a card tray with
cards. In the course of greeting an elderly woman, he stepped into the
parlor. This was a small square apartment carpeted in dark Brussels,
and stuffily glorified in the bourgeois manner by a white marble
mantel-piece, several pieces of mahogany furniture upholstered in
haircloth, a table on which reposed a number of gift books in celluloid
and other fancy bindings, an old-fashioned piano with a doily and a
bit of china statuary, a cabinet or so containing such things as ore
specimens, dried seaweed and coins, and a spindle-legged table or two
upholding glass cases garnished with stuffed birds and wax flowers. The
ceiling was so low that the heavy window hangings depended almost from
the angle of it and the walls.

Thorpe, by some strange freak of psychology, suddenly recalled a wild,
windy day in the forest. He had stood on the top of a height. He saw
again the sharp puffs of snow, exactly like the smoke from bursting
shells, where a fierce swoop of the storm struck the laden tops of
pines; the dense swirl, again exactly like smoke but now of a great
fire, that marked the lakes. The picture super-imposed itself silently
over this stuffy bourgeois respectability, like the shadow of a dream.
He heard plainly enough the commonplace drawl of the woman before him
offering him the platitudes of her kind.

"You are lookin' real well, Mr. Thorpe," she was saying, "an' I just
know Helen will be glad to see you. She had a hull afternoon out to-day
and won't be back to tea. Dew set and tell me about what you've been
a-doin' and how you're a-gettin' along."

"No, thank you, Mrs. Renwick," he replied, "I'll come back later. How is
Helen?"

"She's purty well; and sech a nice girL I think she's getting right
handsome."

"Can you tell me where she went?"

But Mrs. Renwick did not know. So Thorpe wandered about the maple-shaded
streets of the little town.

For the purposes he had in view five hundred dollars would be none
too much. The remaining five hundred he had resolved to invest in his
sister's comfort and happiness. He had thought the matter over and come
to his decision in that secretive, careful fashion so typical of him,
working over every logical step of his induction so thoroughly that
it ended by becoming part of his mental fiber. So when he reached the
conclusion it had already become to him an axiom. In presenting it as
such to his sister, he never realized that she had not followed with