s, so that he might be presentable when he went down town to
collect certain moneys due him.

[Illustration]

They were small rooms, but they were bright and cheerful, being
decorated with sketches and studies of an artistic sort, which may have
been somewhat crude and uncertain as to treatment, but were certainly
pleasant and feminine. Yet few saw them save the young woman and the old
man. The most frequent visitor was a young artist from the West, who
often escorted Miss Dolph to and from the Art League rooms. His name was
Rand; he had studied in Munich; he had a future before him, and was
making money on his prospects. He might just as well have lived in
luxurious bachelor quarters in the lower part of the city; but, for
reasons of his own, he preferred to live in Harlem.

Old Mr. Dolph insisted on going regularly every quarter-day to the
office of the Van Riper Estate, "to collect," as he said, "the interest
due him." Four times a year he went down town on the Eighth Avenue cars,
where the conductors soon learned to know him by his shiny black
broadcloth coat and his snow-white hair. His daughter was always uneasy
about these trips; but her father could not be dissuaded from them. To
him they were his one hold on active life--the all-important events of
the year. It would have broken his tender old heart to tell him that he
could not go to collect his "interest." And so she set his necktie
right, and he went.

When he got out of the car at Abingdon Square he tottered, in his slow,
old way, to a neat structure which combined modern jauntiness with
old-time solidity, and which was labelled simply: "Office of the Van
Riper Estate," and there he told the smilingly indulgent clerk that he
thought he would "take it in cash, this time," and, taking it in cash,
went forth.

And then he walked down through Greenwich Village into New York city,
and into the street where stood the house that his father had built.
Thus he had gone to view it four times a year, during every year save
the first, since he had given it up.

He had seen it go through one stage of decadence after another. First it
was rented, by its new owner, to the Jewish pawnbroker, with his
numerous family. Good, honest folk they were, who tried to make the
house look fine, and the five daughters made the front stoop resplendent
of summer evenings. But they had long ago moved up-town. Then it was a
cheap boarding-house, and vulgar and flashy men and women