had ushered there for the sake of hearing the music, how
the rich joy of being alive, of being young, of being loved, had shone out
of women's eyes. Shimmering satins, dainty gloves and little jewelled
slippers, shapely arms and shoulders, vivacious movements, nods and smiles,
swift glances, ripples, bursts of laughter, an exciting hum of voices.
Then silence, sudden darkness--and music, and the curtain. The great wide
curtain slowly rising....

But all that had passed away.

Roger Gale was a rugged heavy man not quite sixty years of age. His broad,
massive features were already deeply furrowed, and there were two big
flecks of white in his close-curling, grayish hair. He lived in a narrow
red brick house down on the lower west side of the town, in a neighborhood
swiftly changing. His wife was dead. He had no sons, but three grown
daughters, of whom the oldest, Edith, had been married many years. Laura
and Deborah lived at home, but they were both out this evening. It was
Friday, Edith's evening, and as was her habit she had come from her
apartment uptown to dine with her father and play chess. In the living
room, a cheerful place, with its lamp light and its shadows, its
old-fashioned high-back chairs, its sofa, its book cases, its low marble
mantel with the gilt mirror overhead, they sat at a small oval table in
front of a quiet fire of coals. And through the smoke of his cigar Roger
watched his daughter.

Edith had four children, and was soon to have another. A small demure woman
of thirty-five, with light soft hair and clear blue eyes and limbs softly
rounded, the contour of her features was full with approaching maternity,
but there was a decided firmness in the lines about her little mouth. As he
watched her now, her father's eyes, deep set and gray and with signs of
long years of suffering in them, displayed a grave whimsical wistfulness.
For by the way she was playing the game he saw how old she thought him. Her
play was slow and absent-minded, and there came long periods when she did
not make a move. Then she would recall herself and look up with a little
affectionate smile that showed she looked upon him as too heavy with his
age to have noticed her small lapses.

He was grimly amused at her attitude, for he did not feel old at all. With
that whimsical hint of a smile which had grown to be a part of him, he
tried various moves on the board to see how far he could go without
interrupting her reveries. He che