.

To-day he saw all that lay unseen before their dulled vision--all the
show with its million actors. He saw for example the pathos in the
patient eyes of the old lady yonder--still waiting at eighty; he caught
the flash of scarlet ribbon beyond, the silent message of the black one
(another long waiting); the muffled laugh and the muffled oath; the
careless eyes that tossed the coin to the counter, the sharp eyes that
followed it, the dead ones that picked it up and threw it into the
nickeled cash box which flew with it to its golden nest; the tread, the
tread, the tread of a thousand feet, the beat, beat, beat of a thousand
hearts. All these things he saw and heard and felt.

When he had fully replenished his wardrobe he still had several hours
left to him. He remembered a unique book store just off Fifth Avenue
at West Thirty-ninth Street which he had frequently passed, often
lingering in front of the windows to admire quaint English prints. On
cloudy days especially he had often made it a point to walk up there
and breathe in the spirit of sunshine that he found in the green grass
of the old hunting scenes and in the scarlet coats of the
hearty-cheeked men riding to hounds upon their lean horses.

"Come on," he called enthusiastically to Bobby. "We 've just begun."

"Gee!" gasped Bobby. "H'aint you spent it all? Have yer gut more
left?"

"Lots. As much as I can spend until I die."

The boy's face grew eager.

"Say," he asked confidentially. "Where 'd yer git it?"

"Earned it,--the most of it. Sweat for it and starved for it and
suffered for it! And I earned with it the right to spend it, the
_right_, I tell you!"

Bobby shrank back a little before such fierceness. The boy felt a
faint suspicion of what had not before occurred to him: that the man
was crazy. But the next second the gentle smile returned to soften the
tense mouth, and the boy's fear vanished. No one could fear Donaldson
when he smiled.

In front of the modest shop with its quaint sign swinging above the
door, they paused. Donaldson found it difficult to believe that he now
had the right to enter. To him this store had never been anything else
but a part of the scenery of life, a part of the setting of some
foreign world at which he gazed like a boy from the upper galleries of
a theatre. He had rebelled at this, looking with some hostility at the
well groomed men and women who accepted it with such assurance that it
was fo