y sorry, and I wish you good luck," he said, with
flash of the real man under the smooth, steely exterior.

Father scarcely heard him, though he smiled faintly. He read the note
many times as he stumbled home. But he couldn't get himself to show it
to Mother till Sunday afternoon, so proud was she of helping him and
proving herself a business woman--succeeding in a nine-dollar job while
Father, who had once been worth twenty-two good dollars a week, hadn't
been able to keep an eight-dollar job. Being quite human, Father felt a
scornful envy of her for a minute, when she repeated all the pleasant
things that had been said to her. But she was so frank, so touchingly
happy, that he could not long harden his heart.

When he told her of his ill-fortune she put her hand to her breast and
looked desperately afraid. It was only with a dry gasp that she could
say: "Never mind, Seth, you'll find something else. I'm glad you don't
have to handle all those silly card-cases and all. And so--so--oh, I do
hope you find something."

"You won't think I'm entirely a failure?"

"I won't have you use that word! Don't I know--haven't I seen you for
years? Why, I depend on you like--it sounds like a honeymoon, but you're
just about my religion, Seth."

But she went to bed very early, to be absolutely certain of being on
time at Regalberg's Monday morning.

* * * * *

So began for Seth Appleby the haunted days when, drifting through the
gray and ghostly city of winter, he scarce knew whether he was a real
man or a ghost. Down prison corridors that the city calls streets, among
Jewish and Italian firms of which he had never heard, he wandered
aimlessly, asking with more and more diffidence for work, any kind of
work. His shoes were ground down at the heel, now, and cracked open on
one side. In such footgear he dared not enter a shoe-store, his own
realm, to ask for work that he really could do. As his December drifted
toward Christmas like a rudderless steamer in a fog, the cold permitted
him to seek for work only an hour or two a day, for he had no overcoat
and his coat was very thin. Seth Appleby didn't think of himself as one
of the rank of paupers, but rather as a man who didn't have an overcoat.

He had the grippe, and for a week he never left the house. While Mother
proudly carried on the money-earning he tried to do the house-work. With
unskilled hands he swept--leaving snags of dirt in the corners